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09/05/01: convenor
Posted by: grundle2600@hotmail.com (grundle)
If you read Time Magazine's Earth Day special issue from last year, please note that it preaches the Paul Ehrlich side again and again, and ignores the Julian Simon side. This, despite the fact that Ehrlich was wrong and Simon was right. A great example of media bias.
The media shows the doomsayers claiming that drilling at ANWR would kill the caribou. What they usuallly ignore is that 25 years ago, the doomsayers claimed that drilling at Prudhoe Bay would kill the caribou. In reality, since the drilling began there, the caribou population increased from 5,000 to 27,000. The media doesn't want to explain that the doomsayers were wrong.
Bill O'Reilly has stated that he is in favor of campaign finance reform, that he opposes the death penalty, and that he believes in global warming. Not exactly what most people would call "conservative."
Changing the arsenic standard from 50 to 10 would not be cost effective. In other words, the higher cost would kill more people than it would save.
Two years ago, Tom Daschle voted against changiung the standard to 10, but the mainstream press never mentioned that. And they never mentioned his hypocrisy for criticizing Bush for not changing it later on.
Funny how no one worried aobut the old standard until right before the election. The proposed new stadnard was done to make Bush look bad during the elction, not for reasons of safety.
When I watch the news on the 3 big TV networks, when they do stories about the environment, they almost always show the Paul Ehrlich side, and almost never show the Julian Simon side. This, despite the fact that Ehrlich was wrong about everything, and Simon was right about everything.
And when the 3 big networlks talk about guns, they almost never talk about people who use guns for self defense.
One school shooting was stopped by a principal who had a gun. But they never mentioned that the principal used a gun to stop the shooter. Instead, they simply said that the principal had "persuaded" the student to stop killing people.
The vast majority of times that they talk about Gary Condit, they don't mention his party affiliation.
They wrongly blame the 1980s deficit on Reagan's tax cut, and never mention that between 1980 and 1990, federal tax revenues doubled.
They never mention that the past predictions made by the environmental doomsayers were wrong.
They almost never show black Republicans.
They almost never mention the fact that among black children who are raised by married parents, the poverty rate is very low.
They almost never mention that farm subsidies increase the price of food, and thus, are a burden on poor people.
They almost never mention that Al Gore received big campaign contributions from all the big industries that he accused Bush of taking money from.
The 3 big networks
almost never show black Republicans.
For you to post a list of conservative commentators doesn't debunk the idea that the media has a liberal bias.
Whenever I watch the nightly newscast on any of the 3 major TV networks, and they do a report on the environment, they always show the Paul Ehrlich side, and they never show the Julian Simon side. That's liberal bias.
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http://www.mediaresearch.org/news/reality/2001/Fax20010510.h tml
For Immediate Release: Kate Wright - Thursday, May 10, 2001 - Vol. 5, No. 15
Study: ABC, CBS and NBC Never Mentioned That Thousands of Scientists Disagree With Doomsayers TV’s One-Sided Global Warming Nonsense
ABC, CBS and NBC are so committed to the idea that human-caused global warming will be a disaster for the planet, they completely excluded all other points of view from their evening newscasts this year, according to a new study by the MRC’s Free Market Project.
Out of 51 global warming stories shown between January 20 and April 22, only CNN and the Fox News Channel mentioned experts’ lack of consensus — and CNN’s nod toward balance was merely a brief recitation of a statement by President Bush about "the incomplete state of scientific knowledge." In contrast, FNC’s David Shuster showed climate scientist Richard Lindzen, who argued that a recent U.N. paper on global warming was exaggerated. "It came from having scenarios with horrific and unimaginable emissions, and putting them in the most sensitive model," Lindzen explained, offering FNC viewers the sort of hard-news insight the other networks never bothered to find.
One textbook example of bias: On March 29, CBS’s Mark Phillips packed a report with critics of Bush’s decision not to implement the 1997 Kyoto treaty, a deal which would have forced the U.S. to cut industrial emissions to 30 percent below where they are today, a huge economic sacrifice.
"Around the world, anger runs as deep as the flood waters being blamed on the global warming the Kyoto treaty was supposed to fight," Phillips melodramatically began. "President Bush says he’s putting American economic interests first in rejecting Kyoto, and in Britain, where they’re having their wettest winter ever, they sadly agree." CBS then showed the liberal Labor government’s environmental minister lecturing the United States about "short-termism" and "isolationism."
"And that was the polite response," continued Phillips. "Others point to severe weather conditions around the planet: flooding for the second consecutive year in Mozambique; drought and famine in the Sudan. And, they say, the U.S. is substantially to blame. With only about four percent of the world’ s population, the United States famously produces about 25 percent of the world’s harmful green-house gas pollution....Kyoto may have been an imperfect treaty," Phillips groused, "but in an imperfect world, it was the only global warming treaty we had."
By suppressing other points of view, ABC, CBS and NBC made Bush’s anti-Kyoto ruling seem irresponsible and short-sighted. Environmentalists were granted most-favored status, quoted 20 times compared with only three appearances by spokesmen for free market groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
If environmentalists’ gloomy global warming predictions are exaggerated or wrong, then the networks have been pushing the wrong side of the story. Dr. Sallie Baliunas of Harvard’s Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics recently told Tech Central Station’s James Glassman that while the Earth is about 1°F warmer than it was a century ago, it was much warmer a few hundred years ago, long before the smokestack was invented. She told Glassman that claims of catastrophic human-induced warming "are exaggerated. There is maybe some human-made warming, but it’s going to be so small that it’s going to be lost in the natural variability."
But ABC, CBS and NBC shamelessly shut out the views of authentic experts such as Lindzen and Baliunas in favor of the hyped claims of professional environmentalists. That’s not journalism, that’s liberal activism. -- Rich Noyes
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http://www.mediaresearch.org/specialreports/news/sr20000105. html
January 5, 2000
Outgunned: How The Network News Media Are Spinning the Gun Control Debate
Executive Summary
Over the last two years, network TV news viewers have been inundated with tragic images of students running away from gunfire. With every new incident, the networks have blamed guns, and wonder if more gun control laws aren’t an obvious solution. In a study of 653 morning and evening news stories on ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC from July 1, 1997 to June 30, 1999, MRC Senior Media Analyst Geoffrey Dickens documents how:
1. TV News Has Chosen Sides. Stories advocating more gun control outnumbered stories opposing gun control by 357 to 36, or a ratio of almost 10 to 1. (Another 260 were neutral.)
2. Evening News Shows Favored the Anti-Gun Position by 8 to 1. Almost 60 percent of stories (184) favored one side. While 89 percent of those (164) pushed the liberal, anti-gun position, only 11 percent (20) promoted the pro-gun position. ABC’s World News Tonight (43 anti-gun stories to three pro-gun) and CNN’s The World Today (50 to 7) were the most slanted evening shows.
3. Morning News Shows Favored the Anti-Gun Position by 13 to 1. More than half of morning news gun policy segments (208) tilted away from balance. Of those segments, 93 percent (193) pushed the liberal, anti-gun position, while only six percent (15) promoted the pro-gun position. ABC’s Good Morning America (92 to 1) was the most biased morning show.
4. News Programs Are Twice as Likely to Use Anti-Gun Soundbites. Anti-gun soundbites were twice as frequent as pro-gun ones—412 to 209. (Another 471 were neutral.)
5. News Programs Are Twice as Likely to Feature Anti-Gun Guests. In morning show interview segments, gun control advocates appeared as guests on 82 occasions, compared to just 37 for gun-rights activists and 58 neutral spokesmen.
6. Pro-Gun Themes Were Barely Covered. Themes like the decline in federal gun prosecutions under the Clinton administration, the positive use of guns in self-defense, and successful pilot prosecution programs like Project Exile in Richmond, Virginia, drew tiny story counts in the single digits in the 653-story sample.
http://www.mediaresearch.org/specialreports/news/sr20000105b .html
When these numbers are combined with the results of a 1997 study of two years of gun policy stories using the same parameters, MRC analysts have found that in 897 gun policy stories from July 1, 1995 to June 30, 1999, the networks have aired 514 anti-gun stories to 46 pro-gun stories, or a ratio of more than 11 to 1.
American TV viewers were bombarded by evening news stories promoting gun control. Out of 300 evening news segments, anti-gun stories outnumbered pro-gun stories by 164 to 20 (with 116 neutral segments), or an 8-to-1 ratio. Talking heads were slanted toward gun control by a 2-to-1 ratio (296 for gun control vs. 150 for gun rights), with 319 neutral spokesmen. ABC and CNN provided the worst evening news slant, while NBC was the closest to fairness—and they weren’t close.
ABC’s World News Tonight was the most biased in favor of gun control, airing 43 anti-gun stories to only three pro-gun segments, with 24 neutral reports. Within that sample, the talking head ratio matched the overall average of 2-to-1, with 125 gun control soundbites, 62 for gun rights, and 120 neutral clips.
CNN’s The World Today slanted in the direction of gun-control arguments in 50 stories, compared to only seven with substantially more arguments in favor of gun rights. (Thirty-four reports were neutral.) CNN’s selection of talking heads advocating more gun control was the most disproportionate (98 to 40, with 79 neutral clips).
CBS Evening News stories promoted gun control 28 times and favored gun rights on just three occasions (22 were neutral). CBS had the closest ratio of talking heads with 59 for gun control, 35 opposed, and 74 neutral.
NBC Nightly News was the least imbalanced, albeit with a tilt of five to one: 43 anti-gun rights stories versus eight pro-gun rights stories, with 36 neutral pieces. But three of the pro-gun stories came on one night (April 30, 1999). By a ratio of almost 2 to 1, NBC aired gun control exponents with a count of 130 advocates to 72 opponents (and 24 neutral voices).
II. Morning Show Findings
The network morning shows were flooded with visually arresting images from shootings. Out of 353 gun policy segments, anti-gun stories outnumbered pro-gun stories by 193 to 15, or a ratio of more than 13 to 1 (145 were neutral or balanced). Analysts counted both morning news reports and interviews.
ABC’s Good Morning America ran a total of 92 reports supporting gun control compared to just one that favored the gun-rights defense (51 were neutral).
CBS’s This Morning offered 19 stories slanted towards gun control solutions to just four against (with 27 neutral offerings).
NBC’s Today presented the greatest amount of segments leaning toward gun rights, ten, or two-thirds of the morning show total, but also pushed for gun control in 82 segments (along with 88 neutral reports).
Guests. Morning shows were almost twice as likely to feature a gun control advocate than one opposed to more gun control. Gun control supporters appeared on the live morning shows 82 times, compared to just 37 gun rights spokesmen. Another 58 held no pro- or anti-gun views in gun policy segments.
On Good Morning America, 33 guests professed a belief in more legislation limiting gun rights, while only eight opposed such measures, with 212 neutral guests.
NBC’s Today booked three times more gun-rights guests than ABC with 24, but still invited far more gun control advocates (40), with 24 neutral spokesmen.
CBS’s This Morning aired the least interviews, but was the most balanced with just nine guests for gun control, five against, and 13 neutral.
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http://www.mediaresearch.org/news/mediawatch/1990/mw19900401 stud.html
From the April 1990 MediaWatch
Study
TAGS NOT PLANTED ON GREEN GROUPS
Coverage of the environment provides a dramatic example of how the media's mindset prevents a balanced discussion of both sides of an issue. Reporting on left-wing environmental groups promotes their save-the-planet intentions as non-controversial, indeed beyond dispute. Reporters ignore their underlying liberal anti-industrial agenda: the same combination of crippling regulations, prohibitive taxes, and government boondoggles that stunted the economy and killed job opportunities in the late 1970's.
The media's pattern of environmental bias is vividly illustrated by a three-year study of ideological labeling of environmental groups. MediaWatch analysts used the Nexis news data retrieval system to review every story on ten environmental groups in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post in 1987, 1988 and 1989. Out of 2,903 news stories, we found 29 ideological labels, or less than one percent. Of those, 22 were applied to Earth First!, five were given to Greenpeace, and the other two went to the Natural Resources Defense Council. The rest were label-free.
Not only did newspaper reporters fail to identify their liberal tilt, but they usually failed to refer to them as partisan political activists in Washington. Reporters used the words "activist," "advocacy," "lobbying," "militant" or variations thereof, only 155 times (5.3 percent). The newspaper reporters also committed bias by omission -- four of the most active conservative environmental groups were mentioned only 60 times (an average of 15 mentions apiece). By contrast, the ten liberal groups merited about 290 stories each. That's almost 20 times more attention than the conservative groups received. Among the liberal organizations receiving special treatment:
Wildlife Groups. Cloaked in a nonpartisan public image, the "defenders of wildlife" are uncompromising liberals who have blocked a number of Reagan and Bush Administration appointments. A memo from the editor of Audubon Society magazine revealed in The Washington Post last May 31 described the environment as "being royally [expletive] by our Environmental President (gag!). Maybe with a two-pronged attack (from sportsmen and conservation groups) we can shorten Manny Luhan's [sic] tenure at Interior." Still, the National Audubon Society suffered no harsher reference to activism than "arch-advocates of bird conservation," and no ideological labels in 457 stories.
The World Wildlife Fund, once run by Bush EPA Administrator William Reilly, was referred to as "mainstream" three times in 260 stories, even though they gave a medal to doomsday ecologist Paul Ehrlich. The Wilderness Society, counseled by Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson and once home to Earth First! founder Dave Foreman, also went unlabeled.
Self-Described Activist Groups. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) received no liberal labels in 355 stories and only 20 references to activism, 16 of them in The New York Times. The Washington Post referred to EDF's activism only three times and the Los Angeles Times just once, using a Post account that described EDF as "strong clean-air advocates." Environmental Action, a group that grew directly out of Earth Day 1970 and pre-dated Earth First! "ecotage" by teaching conscientious types how to sprinkle nails on freeway interchanges in the 1970's, received no labels and only six references to activism in 51 stories.
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) was often described as "the political arm of the environmental movement," but the print media refused to identify the League's political slant. The LCV has endorsed Michael Dukakis for President, New Jersey Gov. James Florio, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, and California gubernatorial candidate Leo McCarthy, to name just a few. They gave President Bush a "D" report card in 1988. In 111 stories, the League was never given a liberal label. But they were described twice as "nonpartisan."
Direct Action Groups. Greenpeace, famous for disrupting Trident missile tests, had five political labels in 426 stories. Four were "radical" and one was "liberal-leaning." Despite Greenpeace's militant tactics, reporters used activist references only 41 times, or less than 10 percent of the time. Earth First!, the self-proclaimed "ecological saboteurs" renowned for advocating "tree-spiking," which has severely injured several loggers, received the harshest treatment of the lot. In 83 news stories (70 in the Los Angeles Times), Earth First! was labeled 22 times, or about 26 percent of the time. The New York Times called the group "radical" once, but also referred to it as "conventional." The Los Angeles Times employed "radical" or variants like "sometimes radical" 20 times.
Consumer Environmentalists. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the anti-pesticide activist group responsible for last year's apple panic, was the most mentioned environmental group of those studied. Yet in 691 stories, they were labeled only two times. One of those came in Andrew Rosenthal's May 25, 1989 New York Times article headlined "When Left of Center Finds Itself in Mainstream." The Los Angeles Times once called the NRDC "generally liberal," but it also described them as "a group dedicated to saving the planet from pollutants."
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a Ralph Nader spinoff also active in promoting regulation of the food supply, never received a liberal label. The group's Naderite origins were never disclosed in 254 stories. They did have the highest number of activist references (64), but most were positive-sounding, such as "consumer advocacy" and "health advocacy."
On the other hand, the American Council on Science and Health, a prominent opponent of NRDC and CSPI headed by Elizabeth Whelan, received much more suspicious treatment. In 23 stories, reporters called them conservative only once, but referred to them with adjectives like "industry-supported" or listed their corporate donors seven times. Not one story in 2,90 mentioned the industry funding of the liberal environmental groups.
Free-market environmentalists were not only skeptically treated, they were comparatively ignored. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, headed by former EPA official Fred Smith, was mentioned only eleven times, and not once on an environmental issue. The Reason Foundation, a California-based free-market think tank, was mentioned 12 times in the Los Angeles Times. Of its three mentions between the news sections of The New York Times and The Washington Post, two were in obituaries. The Political Economy Resource Center, an up-and-coming free-market environmental research foundation based in Bozeman, Montana, merited only one mention. The New York Times labeled it a "tiny, hard-core, market-incentives think tank."
As environmental issues become more prominent on the American political scene, the public would be better served if reporters spent some time investigating the liberal, anti-business agenda of most environmental groups, and provided more than token attention to organizations that suggest market-based solutions.
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http://www.mediaresearch.org/news/reality/2000/Fax20000419.h tml
For Immediate Release: Dan Gabriel (703) 683-5004 - Wednesday, April 19, 2000 - Vol. 4, No. 17
Will Media’s Earth Day Extravaganza Include Any Dissent from the Environmental Establishment?
Skeptics Frozen Out of Warming Debate
Saturday, April 22 is Earth Day. The ‘70s environmentalists running this year’s multi-national greenfest have chosen global climate change as their marquee issue -- and anyone who doubts this "crisis" warrants further government intervention in the economy risks ridicule by the Hollywood and media elites.
"After decades of rancorous debate, only a handful of the most doctrinaire die-hards still dispute the idea that human activity is heating up the planet," declared Time’s Michael Lemonick in a special Earth Day issue. "What will it take for us to get serious about saving our environment?" asked his colleague, Eugene Linden. "When will environmentalism move from being a philosophy promoted by a passionate minority to a way of life that governs mainstream behavior and policy?"
It’s not as if the media haven’t tried to hurry that moment, as they regularly bury evidence that casts doubt on arguments that radical restrictions on economic activity are required to forestall disaster.
Improving Forecasts - The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has twice lowered its median estimate of future warming, from an original guess of 5.7 F ten years ago, to 4.7 F in 1992 to 3.6 F in 1995. Testifying before Congress last year, climatologist Patrick Michaels said observed temperatures have been "considerably smaller than they were originally forecast to be," and he argued that moderate warming could be more beneficial than harmful.
Yet for years, many in the media have wanted to jump from the science of global warming to its politics. "The Earth is getting warmer all the time," argued ABC’s Peter Jennings on January 4, 1996, "in part because the United States has not been practicing what it has been preaching."
Faulty Models - On January 13, a National Academy of Sciences panel reported that while the Earth’s surface has warmed by about 1.0 F this century, satellites have detected no atmospheric warming. "This gap between surface temperatures and atmospheric temperatures calls the predictive accuracy of the models [used to project future warming] into serious question," wrote Ronald Bailey, editor of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Earth Report 2000.
Most journalists ignored the contradiction. Natalie Pawelski, host of CNN’s Earth Matters, instead characterized it as "a blow to global warming naysayers. A panel of the National Academy of Sciences has concluded that global warming is happening and has accelerated in the last 20 years."
Earth in the Balance? - The media are already hyping the Earth Day re-release of Al Gore’s 1992 environmental tome. In it, the Vice President wrote "global warming is no longer a distant threat," and he reaffirmed his support for the 1997 Kyoto treaty, which calls for cuts in the greenhouse gas emissions of developed nations. But Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist and president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, wrote last year that "the Kyoto Protocol, while economically harmful, would be ineffective in reducing the calculated temperature increase."
The MRC’s Free Market Project found that more than 80 percent of global warming stories on the networks’ evening newscasts from 1993-1997 pretended that skeptical climate scientists didn’t even exist. Will those who argue that the evidence on global warming doesn’t support major changes in economic policy finally get their turn this Earth Day, or will they once again be frozen out of the coverage? -- Rich Noyes, Director of MRC’s Free Market Project
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