Tag: global warming

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Obama’s Legacy: The Trashing of Free Speech

No administration in memory has more thoroughly undermined freedom of speech and of the press than that of President Obama.  From the White House itself, as well as the independent and executive branch agencies, have come a steady stream of policies, initiatives, and pronunciamentos that have threatened or compromised both of these constitutional rights.

Indeed, the Administration’s example has inspired like-minded actions outside of the White House.  For example, those Democratic members of Congress who actively encouraged IRS action against conservative nonprofit organizations before Lois Lerner turned to the task.

And the 16 state attorneys general, Democrats all, who have recently embarked on a campaign designed to silence people who are skeptical of the evidence of anthropogenic global warming and/or its effects and remediation.

But it’s the example of the Administration itself that is most notable.  Who could forget the performance of then-UN ambassador Susan Rice who, five days after the Benghazi attack that took the life of the American ambassador, went on national TV and blamed the attacks on an anti-Islam video shown on YouTube?

This followed by two days Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s similar claim, and all of it despite the fact that senior Administration officials knew at the time that Benghazi was a premeditated attack that had nothing to do with the video.  >>Read More

Maines is president of The Media Institute.  The opinions expressed are his alone and not those of The Media Institute, its board, advisory councils, or contributors.  The full version of this article appeared in The Hill on July 13, 2016.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Global Warming and the Chilling of Free Speech

One of the most important, if underreported, defamation cases in recent memory is being mounted by Prof. Michael Mann.  The creator of the controversial “Hockey Stick” graph, Mann is a leading figure among “global warming” scientists, and the targets of his lawsuit are prominent conservatives – the writer Mark Steyn, National Review magazine, the public policy outfit Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and a person who wrote for a CEI publication.

The gravamen of Mann’s suit is that the defendants defamed him by their published comments.  As an example, CEI stated in its initial blog post that Mann “has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science,” while National Review said that “Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus.”  Mann further argues that the defendants’ global warming skepticism derives from their financial and political interests.

Successful defamation suits, particularly for a “public person” in a place like Washington, D.C., are very hard to win.  In part, this is because the District of Columbia (along with 28 states) has enacted an anti-SLAPP law that is intended to discourage “strategic lawsuits against public participation,” where the goal of the plaintiff isn’t to win but to intimidate and burden  defendants with the cost of their legal defense.

The other reason such suits are hard to win is because of the substantial and vital editorial latitude given the media, courtesy of the First Amendment.  This explains why the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), joined by 18 other media organizations, including such as Politico, the Washington Post, Dow Jones & Co., and the National Press Club, early on filed an amicus brief in support of the defendants.

For what should have been a relatively simple case, quickly yielding a dismissal of Mann’s suit, Mann vs. Steyn, et al., has been dragging on since fall of 2012.  In part, this is because of appeals of earlier procedural rulings, and also because Mann had to file an amended complaint.  Bottom line: It’s not clear even now if the case will get to the trial stage.  In fact it’s not even clear which court will act next in this case – could be the trial court or the D.C. Court of Appeals.

Adding to the confusion is Mark Steyn’s unhappiness with National Review’s legal strategy, such that he has now dropped out of participation with NR’s lawyers, and is currently representing himself.

So this is a snapshot in time of the murky legal case: Considerably less murky, however, is the larger picture – the one that is painted outside the courtroom, and that has implications not just for the plaintiff and defendants in this case, but for everyone who values freedom of speech.

There is perhaps no issue today that is more hotly debated than global warming, and contrary to Mann’s opinion, this debate rages on not because of the ideological or financial interests of some of the skeptics.  The debate rages on because of so many unanswered questions.

There’s been no global warming for at least 15 years.  Why is that?  Some suggest the heat is hiding at the bottom of oceans.  But whether it’s “hiding” there, or in Al Gore’s house, doesn’t that fact, by itself, prove that the computer models said to predict specific warming timelines are unreliable?

Then there are the vital related questions – beyond the expertise of climate scientists – like the economic impacts of global warming, and its prospective amelioration.  What do climate scientists know about engineering, economics, agronomy, or scores of other disciplines of the sort needed to recommend specific energy policies?

Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that Mann and the warming prophets are right: that anthropogenic warming is occurring; that its net results demand action; that we know what that action should be, and that whatever we did would provide societal results that, on balance, were preferable to doing nothing.

In that case, wouldn’t it be a good idea for climate scientists to attempt at all costs to persuade the public and policymakers to their point of view?  Wouldn’t it seem that defamation suits against people who disagree with you is counterproductive?

Whatever the facts of “climate change,” there’s evidence that few people take global warming seriously. Witness, for instance, the recent WSJ/NBC News poll, which found that, of 13 issues people were asked to rank by priority, “addressing climate change” was dead last.

Writing a comment in reply to a predictable global warming rant in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, one reader volunteered this:

It isn’t the big corporations or dissident scientists that are the problem, it’s the pesky public.  They simply don’t believe the climate change bandwagon.

Why?  Well, one of the biggest reasons is the zealotry of climate change supporters. Arguments that should be factual, with room for disagreement, have become intolerant slanging sessions, with insult and invective traded in place of reason. Even the phrase “deniers” is redolent of a religious movement more than scientific debate….

If climate change believers want to win more support, then it’s time to step back from the barricades and engage with the average man on the street.  Win the argument through persuasion, not rant. We’ve all had enough of that.

                                               

Patrick Maines is president of The Media Institute, and a former assistant publisher of National Review. The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The American Samizdat

Back in the bad old days, “samizdat” was the name given to that body of politically forbidden literature that was clandestinely published and circulated in the Soviet Union.  In 2010, the Internet serves as an American samizdat, to the advantage of conservatives of one shade or another.

The Internet advantages “conservatives” more than “liberals” not because there are more or better conservative websites, but because of (1) the larger numbers of conservatives; and (2) the failure of the legacy media to portray conservative views and concerns.

No issue better illustrates this phenomenon than the extraordinary revelations of fraud and abuse in the “global warming” debate.  Despite the steadily growing number of Internet stories challenging the findings and practices of such as the IPCC and the East Anglia CRU, the mainstream U.S. media (the broadcast networks, newsweeklies, wire services, the Washington Post and New York Times) have shown little or no interest in these stories.

Instead, most of these news outlets continue to print or broadcast reports that are oblivious to the damage done in recent weeks to the claim of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  And even where they have made mention of this development, they’ve often done so in a way that’s calculated to minimize the impact of the exposes.

A good example is the story published in the Washington Post by Julia Eilperin and David Farenthold.  Under the headline “Series of missteps by climate scientists threatens climate-change agenda,” the authors offer a perfunctory rundown of the many allegations that have recently been made against AGW literature, while repeating, mantra-like and in virtually every other paragraph, some variation on the claim of a scientific consensus that “climate change is happening.”

The contrast between this kind of coverage, or non-coverage, by the MSM, and the multitude of critical stories available on the Internet, many of them links to articles published in major British newspapers, is startling.  But news aggregators like the Drudge Report aren’t the only example of the way the Internet is empowering conservative voices re this and other issues.

The online comments sections of the MSM themselves are proving to be fertile soil for conservative opinion.  In fact, one sometimes wonders what the MSM’s reporters make of the comments that follow publication of their pieces online.  As of the time this piece is being written, for instance, the Eilperin/Farenthold story has attracted about 200 comments, perhaps 70 percent of them critical of the reporters for whitewashing, or failing to mention in sufficient detail, the “Climategate” revelations.

Other examples of the ways in which the American samizdat is facilitating right-of-center news and opinion can be seen in the widespread circulation of important stories similarly ignored until late in the news cycle, like the Acorn scandal, and more recently of exposes of the role of public employee unions in the deteriorating financial condition of so many states and municipalities.

There was a time, not so long ago, when news coverage by the MSM could set the agenda, and prosper, whatever its slant.  No more.  The issue today is how much longer the MSM will continue to practice center-left journalism in a center-right country.  At a time when their business models are in disarray, and the economy on its uppers, how long before the MSM come to believe that this is just bad business?

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The MSM: In a Horse Race to Irrelevancy?

Perhaps because of their declining prospects, much of the mainstream media are acting very hinky these days.  On the one hand we have the spectacle of such as the Associated Press and Newsweek openly adopting opinion as their journalistic motif.  While on the other we see newspapers, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, awash in the kind of political reporting that reduces even the most important policy issues to the banalities of “horse race” journalism.

This latter development has become all the more insufferable in the current nightmarish environment, where every current and proposed law or regulation should be more carefully analyzed for its effect on the economy than for its impact on politicians and political parties.

Coverage of the health care debate has been singularly inadequate for precisely this reason.  For every news and feature story that has delved into the effects, say, of the “public option” or the “employer mandate,” a hundred have dwelt on the chances of legislative passage, or on the political winners and losers.

Comes now the leaked e-mail  messages from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, just days before an important environmental summit in Copenhagen, and the question is whether the MSM, in the wake of it, will finally treat the subject of global warning with the care and objectivity that such a complex subject demands.

Even without so-called cap-and-trade legislation looming on the congressional horizon, the many national and international environmental laws that are now being implemented or considered require that global warming be closely scrutinized for its scientific findings, and for the impact and efficacy of any public policies as may be pursued in consequence.  The unseemly aspects of the CRU correspondence simply adds fuel to what should be a brightly burning subject even without it.

Consider, for instance, the critical linkages that have to be established and explained if “global warming” is to be understood by people generally (as distinguished from “warmists” or “skeptics”), as a subject they should care about.

First, it has to be clear that warming is happening, and that it is man-made, a subject about which there was, in fact, debate even before the CRU debacle.  Then it has to be determined that said warming is of such peril something needs to be done about it.  (Again, the subject of debate.)  Then, of course, it has to be shown that there is something that can be done about it.  And finally, we have to know that what we do won’t have negative consequences (like, for instance, on the economy) that are worse than the effects of the warming itself.

Seen in this way the opinions of climatologists are just one element, and not even the most important one, that needs to be considered and fully examined.  But is that happening in the coverage of this issue by the MSM?  Doesn’t look like it.  Instead, as with their coverage of health care reform, news stories about global warming tend to be either (1) preposterously opinionated, and wrapped in the familiar blather of political correctness, or (2) woefully superficial, a consequence of their horse-race aspects and focus not on substance but on the political sideshow.

Hardly a day goes by without someone, somewhere, lamenting the prospective demise of journalism, by which they mean, even if they don’t say so, what we have come to call the mainstream media – the broadcast networks, big-city papers, the newsweeklies, the wire services.  But as shown in their coverage of global warming and health care reform, today’s MSM appear to be adrift, and operating apart not only from their traditions, but also from what is in their own, and our, best interest.

Cross-posted in Huffington Post, here.