Posted by
Average Voter on Monday, August 11, 2008 7:59:24 PM
Great article in
Slate from Ron Rosenbaum on teaching journalism and how schools have become blind to their own practice.
I found myself thinking about this when I came across an unexpected disjunction in the July/August issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. The issue leads off with a strong, sharply worded editorial called "The Dissent Deficit." (It's not online, but it should be.) In it, the magazine, a publication of the Columbia School of Journalism—and thus a semi-official upholder of standards in the semi-official profession of journalism—argues clearly and unequivocally that allowing dissent to be heard and understood is part of a journalist's mission.
Great! All good journalism presents both sides (excluding opinion of course).
Yet, when it comes to global warming, what is there left to debate?
It was troubling, then, to find, in an article in the very same issue of CJR, an argument that seems to me to unmistakably marginalize certain kinds of dissent.
The contention appears in an article called, with deceptive blandness, "
Climate Change: What's Next?" The article doesn't present itself as a marginalizer of dissent. It rather presents itself as a guide for "green journalists" on what aspects of climate change should be covered now that the Truth about "global warming"—whether it's real, and whether it's mainly caused by humans—is known.
"There's no more debate. We face a planetary emergency. . . . There is no more scientific debate among serious people who've looked at the evidence.
Mr. Rosenbaum goes on:
About two-thirds of the story offers tips and warnings like "watch out for techno-optimism." Alas, the author doesn't inspire confidence that she takes her own warnings to heart. The very first paragraph of her story contains a classic of credulous "techno-optimism":
… a decade from now, Abu Dhabi hopes to have the first city in the world with zero carbon emissions. In a windswept stretch of desert, developers plan to build Masdar city, a livable environment for fifty thousand people that relies entirely on solar power and other renewable energy.
All that's missing from the breathless, real-estate-brochure prose is a plug for the 24-hour health club and the concierge service for condo owners.
As I have said before, the media is way left of center; so all that these journalists read, all of their friends and confidants, their whole world really, is saturated in leftyness. That news does not recognize dissentors of global warming because there are none in their world. The debate on global warming is over and has been over since Al Gore declared it so.
My point is that most of the MSM's do a half-***ed job of putting in dessenting views. But sometimes they come to believe in something so completely that they simple don't realize that the subject is even still up for debate. And that is how well the enviromentalists have done in pushing their agenda. They have taken control of the climate debate to the point that any dissenting views are believed to be nothing more than corruption and lies. They have siezed the media with catch phrases like "big oil" and "drill and burn republicans".
The problem is, as Freeman Dyson, one of the great scientists of our age, put it in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, environmentalism can become a religion, and religions always seek to silence or marginalize heretics.