UPDATE: Yes, the false accusation that Gore was exaggerating came from none other than Roger Pielke, Jr. And yes, I just re-confirmed with Gore’s office that Pielke is as wrong today in his false claims as he was 2 years ago (here). Pielke has enlisted Anthony “shout them down in the comments section” Watts in his effort smear Al Gore and me and anyone who tries to explain the science of how global warming is driving more extreme weather.
In 2009, the Washington Post printed a remarkable number of dreadful pieces on global warming — including one by Bjorn Lomborg, two by Sarah Palin (!) and, most infamously, three by George Will that shockingly repeated global warming lies the Post knew were lies (see short list here).
Gawker weighed in with, “The Washington Post Has the Worst Opinion Section in America,” explaining they “openly allow George Will to lie, to straight-up lie, without fact-checking or corrections.” The Columbia Journalism Review called it The Will Affair.
So who could possibly do a media analysis that concluded the Washington Post covered climate well in 2009? Hint: It’s the same person who utterly misanalyzed the spending data to conclude climate bill opponents were outspent by proponents. The answer is after the jump, as if you didn’t already know….
In the umpteenth evisceration of Matthew Nisbet’s widely debunked “false narrative” — the Climate Shift report — Tim Lambert (Deltoid) redoes Nisbet’s media analysis and, surprise, surprise finds it as thoroughly lacking as everything else in the report.
Lambert takes as his entry point the piece Time‘s Bryan Walsh did on the report:
Look at Walsh’s summary of one of Nisbet’s key findings:
Mainstream news coverage–New York Times, Washington Post, CNN.com, Politico and Wall Street Journal–of climate change in 2009 and 2010 actually represented the general scientific consensus on the issue: that global warming is real and that manmade greenhouse gas emissions are a main driver. The idea that the media has engaged in “false balance” in reporting on climate change is, in Nisbet’s view, false.
Compare with Nisbet’s own statement of that finding:
In 2009 and 2010, at The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN.com, nine out of 10 news and opinion articles reflected the consensus view on the reality and causes of climate change. At Politico, at least seven out of 10 articles portrayed the consensus view.
Did you notice which news source wasn’t mentioned? Nisbet’s analysis found that the Wall Street Journal did engage in “false balance”, but he did not mention this in his key finding. He also downplayed the substantial presence of false balance at Politico.
I was intrigued by some of the other numbers in Nisbet’s paper. He found that in the Washington Post in the 11 months before Copenhagen, 93% of the articles reflected the scientific consensus, 5% were falsely balanced and just 2% dismissive of the consensus.
This suggests that “false balance” was all but absent from the Washington Post during that period, when in fact the Washington Post was indulging in a pathological version of false balance, deciding that George Will was entitled to his own facts. In the Washington Post a statement from the Polar Research Group can be balanced by a falsehood from George Will about what the Polar Research Group said.
I decided to look at the those articles myself. I selected the sample in the same way as Nisbet, except that I used Factiva rather than LexisNexis, and used all the articles rather than 1 in 4. I found that 110 (76%) reflected the consensus view, 28 (19%) were falsely balanced, and 7 (5%) were dismissive. Falsely balanced articles reporting on the science (like this one) were very rare. Instead, the falsely balanced articles were about politics, with the science being balanced by a statement from Inhofe that it was all a big hoax.
That means the Washington Post coverage (news and opinion) before Cophenhagen was comparable to the Wall Street Journal‘s!
NISBET AND WILL
Oh, but there Lambert and I and all fact-based people go criticizing Will’s repeated lies again — falling into the very trap that Nisbet warned about at the end of a 2009 Revkin story in the NYT that falsely equated George Will with Al Gore:
But Dr. Nisbet said that for Mr. Will, there was little downside in stretching the bounds of science to sow doubt.
Criticism of Mr. Will’s columns, Dr. Nisbet said, “only serves to draw attention to his claims while reinforcing a larger false narrative that liberals and the mainstream press are seeking to censor rival scientific evidence and views.”
As I wrote at the time — in NYT’s Revkin embraces false balance, equates Will’s active disinformation with Gore’s effort to understand and communicate climate realism:
Will wasn’t “stretching the bounds of science.” He was lying. Making stuff up. Repeating long-debunked myths….
George Will writes a column published in hundreds of newspapers and read by millions and millions of people “” and [Nisbet says] the proper strategy to deal with this broad-based disinformation effort is “¦ to say nothing? Gosh, I really hope Will doesn’t start writing about how cigarette smoking is actually good for you….
It boggles the mind that any serious reporter for the New York Times would quote such an inane point of view, let alone present it with no response whatsoever.
As a fascinating aside, Revkin’s false accusation that Gore was exaggerating came from none other than Roger Pielke, Jr. — a charge completely debunked here. Now Pielke, purely coincidentally no doubt, just so happens to be 1) a paid independent “reviewer” of Nisbet’s report, 1) a big champion of Nisbet’s report on his blog, and 3) a senior fellow at the Breakthrough Institute whose primary foundation funder — Peter Teague of The Nathan Cummings Foundation — is the sole funder of Nisbet’s report. And purely coincidentally no doubt, the Nisbet report pushes Breakthrough’s false narrative. It’s like a false narrative industrial complex. But I digress.
MORE DEBUNKING OF NISBET’S FALSE MEDIA NARRATIVE
Nisbet’s media analysis has been widely debunked. MediaMatters eviscerated it here: “Report Glosses Over Media Failures In Climate Coverage.”
For completeness’s sake, I’ll update my earlier debunking. I interviewed a number of media experts about Nisbet’s report, including Max Boykoff, one of the country’s leading authorities on the media coverage of climate. Boykoff was also a paid expert reviewer, and, like Brulle, he also didn’t see the finished report or Executive Summary until it was also distributed to the press.
- Nisbet in Exec Sum: “The era of false balance in news coverage of climate science has come to an end. In comparison to other factors, the impact of conservative media and commentators on wider public opinion remains limited.”
- Max Boykoff: “This particular conclusion reaches beyond the findings in the study.”
- Brulle: “I think this conclusion is bogus.”
So, like the financial analysis, the second, shaky pillar of Nisbet’s analysis is built on quicksand.
Boykoff explained to me that he stands behind his 2010 analysis that “exaggeration of outlier voices ["denialism"] continues within the U.S. media” (see Boykoff on “Exaggerating Denialism). Both he and Brulle believe the impact of the disinformation campaign and media miscoverage can’t be dismissed. Many other experts ignored by Nisbet agree.
Amazingly, Nisbet, who doesn’t do any analysis of his own on the impact of Fox News, repeatedly asserts that watching Fox News has no net impact on viewers since but merely reinforces the views of those who choose to watch it (p. 66):
“¦ the use of conservative media outlets such as Fox News and focusing events such as Climategate tend to reinforce existing views about climate change rather than altering them.
The problem for Nisbet is that both of the major papers he cites on the subject come to a different conclusion. In particular, he cites a study led by Jon Krosnick of Stanford, “Frequent Viewers of Fox News Are Less Likely to Accept Scientists’ Views of Global Warming.” Nisbet claims this is an accurate reading of the paper (p. 67):
Krosnick attributes the findings to motivated reasoning. Conservative-leaning individuals who already hold stronger doubts about climate change are more likely to view Fox News, and this viewing reinforces these doubts.
But that isn’t what Krosnick’s paper concludes, as anyone can see. Krosnick notes that his “Figure 1 shows how more exposure to Fox News was associated with less endorsement of the views of mainstream scientists about global warming,” and says while he can’t know for sure whether people were persuaded by Fox or selectively chose Fox:
We therefore suspect that the relations documented in Figure 1 are likely to result from a combination of persuasion by Fox News coverage and of selective exposure by Republicans and conservative viewers to Fox News.
I called Krosnick up and checked this with him. He confirmed my reading. Nisbet mis-cited him.
Nisbet himself correctly notes that the second study he cites, “Climate on Cable: The Effects of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC on Global Warming Beliefs and Perceptions,” led by Feldman found that “the views of Republicans on climate change may be less solidified than Democrats, thereby making them more easily influenced by the content of cable news,” specifically Fox News. In fact, Feldman’s study itself explicitly says its findings are “suggestive of direct persuasion, whereby the views of conservative-Republicans are reflective of the cable news outlet they watch.”
So the two key papers Nisbet cites find that the viewers of Fox News’ biased climate coverage are less likely to accept scientists’ views of global warming “” and that direct persuasion appears to have played a role in shifting their views. So much for his Exec Sum assertion “The era of false balance in news coverage of climate science has come to an end.” For more background on why Nisbet’s claim is absurd, see “Foxgate: Leaked email reveals Fox News boss Bill Sammon ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science.”
Nisbet’s entire media analysis — like his entire financial analysis — is inaccurate and untenable, just as his comments on Will and Gore were 2 years ago. Nisbet has been pushing this false narrative on the media for years now. The only thing that has changed is that Nisbet backs up his false narrative with an analysis of a few print and online news sources — which has now been completely debunked.
The Nieman journalism ‘watchdog’ at Harvard reposted my initial critique of Matthew Nisbet’s Climate Shift report with the headline, “Killing a false narrative before it takes hold.” Sadly, the false narrative lives on.
I’ll end this post the way Lambert ends his post, with an extended excerpt from an amazing David Roberts post at Grist:
The most puzzling part of Walsh’s post, though, is his umbrage that Joe Romm is trying deliberately to “kill a false narrative.” Walsh says, “as a journalist I’m not a huge fan of being told what I should and shouldn’t think.”
But, but [splutter] … what is Nisbet’s report if not a carefully constructed and packaged narrative designed to tell Walsh and others what they should think? In fact, the entire Breakthrough assault on environmental groups, begun in 2005, has been one of the most adept and skillful constructions of a media narrative I’ve ever witnessed. They and their acolytes are brilliant at manipulating the professional mores and self-images of journalists. By contrast, love him or hate him (and I’m a lover), Joe Romm is not exactly a slick media spin artist. He doesn’t seem to know any way of communicating other than by stating, in the strongest possible terms, what he believes to be correct. He doesn’t couch his criticism in the sort of soothing, this-side, that-side, we’re-all-reasonable-people throat clearing that attracts the admiration of Serious People. He just blasts away, all guns blazing; he can’t help it. Whatever you call that, it’s hardly a devious strategy to control Bryan Walsh’s mind. It’s pretty above board! The guy who really wants to manipulate your narratives, the guy who’s good at it, doesn’t tell you he’s doing it. After all, here’s Walsh scolding greens for not meditating on the conclusions of a report based on numbers he admits are dubious. Looks like someone succeeded in capturing the narrative, and it wasn’t Romm.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Thanks for your hard work here, Joe, which is especially important because nobody else is doing it at anywhere near this level of detail.
Roberts’ excellent piece was worth reposting, too. Major hat tip to both of you.
Since you and Dave cover a lot of other territory, what do you think of my prior suggestion that a media monitoring organization should systematically take this on? The truth gets out in bits and pieces- Lambert, Cook, and Mandia’s CRRT are also good- but a clearinghouse that would include full monitoring and analysis would be even better.
It need not be especially polemical- all of the falsehoods and bad reporting out there are horrifying enough.
Blogs should be covered, too. Watts, for example, recently responded to the new studies about higher sea level predictions by posting charts showing that the sea level rise graph will continue up at a 1 foot per century rate. McIntyre remains obsessed with tree rings and, as with the birthers, the whole “show me the code!” schtick.
A site that would refute all of these kinds of stories in detail could be a central resource for a lot of people, including MSM editors.
There is probably funding available from a foundation- or maybe CAP?
Speaking of interesting framing, have you checked out Monbiot’s latest?
“The green problem: how do we fight without losing what we’re fighting for?”
guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/may/05/green-problem-environmentalism
[JR: Let's just say it's not my favorite Monbiot piece.]
I have to echo Mike’s (@#1)first paragraph. Your services are unique and appreciated.
[JR: Thanks. And on Monday, CP will double my services!]
Speaking of media coverage. I’m not a regular “Scientific American” reader, but last night at the library a headline from a past article (2010, I think) titled, “can we have a climate “conversation?”, caught my eye. I was shocked by the generally positive coverage given to many deniers and their websites–and the very flattering coverage of Prof. Curry’s attempt to “reach out” to deniers–and the cherry-picking negativity toward the IPCC report.
It was chilling to see that sort of coverage in a leading science publication for lay readers. If I had read it a year ago–before I decided to get educated on this issue–I would have assumed there is a real, honest debate about the science of global warming.
Speaking of media coverage, the NYT published “Global Warming Reduces Expected Yields of Harvests in Some Countries, Study Says,” a review of a single paper, “Climate Trends and Global Crop Production Since 1980″ by David B. Lobell, Wolfram Schlenker, and Justin Costa-Roberts, published May 5 in Science.
Justin Gillis drew a conclusion that differs from the Science article’s abstract. Without a subscription to Science at the moment myself, I leave it to Joe or others if anyone wants to do a more detailed analysis right away.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/science/earth/06warming.html?scp=5&sq=gillis&st=cse
Joe,
I too appreciate your great work.
Joan, thanks for the link. Food has been a big concern of mine too and I wonder if production/scarcity/prices will be the first real wake-up call the average person will link to climate. Of course, reasons for reduced ag output can be manipulated like reasons for weather…
Here’s the core issue. The conservatives have dug themselves so far deep into climate change denial that they can never really get out of the hole. It is taken as an article of faith that climate change is, at worst, a socialist plot to get everybody to live in huts, or at best, a power and money grab by those lying Democrats / scientists. Even the blatant “flip-flopping” on cap-n-trade that a lot of the republicans in congress or those running for the White House have done is sort of swept under the rug.
Most media, except for ALL of Faux News and the “opinion” programming on other networks, want to appear unbiased as much as possible. Since climate change has been politicized to such a degree (by the right), they HAVE to balance peer-reviewed science with denialist nonsense, or at least avoid endorsing the consensus opinion of the world’s scientific apparatus. It is a no-win situation for CNN, nightly network news and the newspapers to appear to endorse the reality of climate change. They risk losing viewership since everybody who already cares about the issue has generally made up their mind. The people who don’t care about climate change aren’t going to switch their news source because of excellent climate change coverage either. There has to be some way to disrupt this counterproductive dynamic…
Unlike the Wash. Post Bloomberg actually has an energy finance team which produced this video
China Has “Huge Challenge” Meeting Power Demand
Justin Wu, an analyst for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, talks about China’s growing energy demand and the challenges the government may face meeting power needs.
http://www.newslook.com/videos/310923-china-has-huge-challenge-meeting-power-demand?autoplay=true
Nice work, Joe!
Re your #3 reply, cloning always was the obvious solution. :)
An added facet of the RP Jr.-Cummings connection is the latter’s continued funding of the Hartwell Group (current grant listed on the NCF site). I suppose it was wishful thinking that we’d seen the last of the HG.
Re your analysis of Nisbet’s paper, there are a couple of broader points we shouldn’t lose sight of:
1) Placement and frequency of publication are in a sense more important that the content of the coverage. The most tightly-written article on a critical aspect of climate science or policy isn’t going to have much of an impact, even in the NYT, if it shows up near the bottom of page A-8 as opposed to over the fold on the front page. This is a pretty direct application of Marshall McLuhan’s “medium is the message” concept. The media knows very well how to handle what they have decided is an existential crisis: wall-to wall coverage. The public understands this, and very much gets the implied message when the media *don’t* treat the climate as if it’s in crisis. In a sense, a small amount of coverage on story saying there is a crisis is self-canceling. I’m not sure what if anything can be done about this paradigm, but ignoring it (as “framing” expert Nisbet did) isn’t helping. It’s as if he’s saying “Watch the frame, but pay no attention to the wall holding it up.”
2) Much of the damage done by false balance to public perception of climate change was in the past. Current media coverage may indeed be more balanced, but that doesn’t undo the past effect. I think many journalists will have read Nisbet’s report as a sort of absolution.
OT: Charlie Petit just posted a link to a story he wrote after attending a climate change presentation at a tea party meeting out in some cow town between SF and Sacramento. It’s a real eye-opener in terms of both the content and the nature of the fake expert involved, and IMO is worth highlighting in a post. This example of the “science” discussed, and then the evasiveness of the “expert” when asked about his scientific qualifications is amusing, in a depressing kind of way:
Charlie’s summation of the standard conspiracy theory talking points (I think intended to confirm common ground with the audience) that preceded this passage is even more depressing.
Another excellent piece. I really appreciate your work (and that of some fine regular commenters). I’d feel lost without ClimateProgress.
The “false narrative industrial complex” is clearly a well-prepared fall-back position for the time when stuff is rather too obviously happening, leaving the screamers and loonies to spiral into inconsequential hysteria (while still serving a purpose).
The strategic aim is to put off the sense of urgency that is so far lacking everywhere. The sort of urgency that can see political and economic arrangements restructured quite substantially in order to get things done. That’s the nightmare for some.
Am I just having bad luck today or are there ‘naughty’ words that trigger this technology to make a comment disappear? If the latter, what are they? Thanks, ME
[JR: You got stuck in the spam filter. Not sure why. Seems to be happening randomly.]
‘False balance’ is a problem here in Australia, too. The ABC, since it was purged by Howard in the 1990s and the Board stacked with Rightwing ideologues, has moved way to the Murdochian Right, with many of his Evil Empire’s functionaries moving directly into positions of power and influence. Hence the denialists have made great advances, culminating in the ‘Great Global Warming Swindle’ being forced onto the network by the Board. That led to a revolt, exacerbated when the Howard appointed Chairman (a notorious denialist) berated his troops for not showing ‘balance’ in their reporting, which led to him being upbraided from the floor by a particularly insubordinate peasant. The Fairfax press is likewise, with denialism continuing its remorseless advance, and several ‘notable’ opinion blatherers therein being febrile denialists.
But, naturally, it is the Murdoch apparat that, as in all things, displays the pathologies of false balance in the most exaggerated forms. The Murdochian ‘false balance’ is uniquely its own, too, in that it consists of coverage, in the opinion, letters, features and news sections, that is about 90% or so hard-core denialism ie it don’t exist and people who say that it does are Communist subversives. There is a leavening of Lomborgian ‘Yeah it’s a problem, but a small one’ humbuggery, and an occasional sane voice. These are tactical concessions and ‘set-ups’ only, as with the very infrequent appearance of some suitably compliant Palestinian to put their case, because both are followed by torrents of abuse, refutation and contempt, restoring the desired Murdochean ‘balance’ between good and evil.
The ‘false balance’ within the Murdoch complex is entirely rhetorical and, in my opinion, quite madly cynical and mendacious. The Murdocheans simply assert, despite the irrefutable evidence of one’s eyes, that they are ‘balanced’ and ‘fair’ (echoes of Fox News are, obviously, no accident) and indeed the only media that provide balanced reportage on climate destabilisation (the Murdocheans spend a lot of time and energy hectically abusing other media in this country). Of course this is the disinformationist utilising the harlot’s prerogative-power without responsibility. The Murdochean apparatus sits above politics, above society, invulnerable due to its propaganda power and its ready recourse to use it to vilify and intimidate those who cross it, and, to all intents and purposes, it is, I believe, the real governing power in this country these days, and all to the bad.
I couldn’t find the part regarding Gore’s reaffirmation Joe. Could you help me out?
[JR: It takes some time to fully debunk Pielke's falsehoods. It's up now.]
Actually have to look at Nisbet’s timeline. The second Palin item falls into the second time period, by his definition. And, Nisbet would not have included the first Palin piece because of the absurdity of how he structured the analysis.
In any event, simply with Will’s disastrous piece, Nisbet would need to have 72 opinion pieces supporting climate science to provide for his 96% of the WashPost opinion pieces supporting climate consensus.
See: http://getenergysmartnow.com/2011/04/21/nisbets-climate-shift-and-where-did-they-get-these-numbers-item-374/
At the time Eli had something to say about Roger, ahem, exaggerating about Gore exaggerating.
Didn’t make much of it at the time, but Roger posted a graph that he claimed Gore had shown which was not the graph Gore had shown, but one that exaggerated what Gore had shown (this gets very self referential, but anything with Roger’s spore on it gets self-referential).
The point which was skipped over at the time, is that the exaggerated graph was published by Charles Blow in a political commentary, and Roger Jr. as a self-referring expert on hurricane damage had to know it was wrong.
He propagated the lie.
I have not found out, on short notice, if Matthew Nisbet’s communications training included how to conduct a rigorous survey and report data gaps and other variability. His professional blurb terms him a “social scientist,” which at some universities would imply competence in statistics and adherence to professional standards of data collection and presentation.
Any information?
Regarding communicating with the public in general, Daubert hearings are a somewhat-related topic that I’d like to see discussed somewhere, sometime, particularly regarding how climatological experts are heard in the courts. In a Daubert hearing, a judge determines the competency and trustworthiness of expert witnesses before the experts can be questioned in front of a jury.
Thanks Joe for rescuing my complete answer, ME