Take your pick among variants of that basic theme seen among recent reports: “Climate change media coverage declining.” Or plummeting / shrinking / stopped / not increasing / plunging.
It’s actually just one more among myriad talking points put out by people on the other side of the climate issue that just ain’t so. Gaslighting.
Talking points put out by enviro-activists who want the public to spread it by any means possible without ever checking the veracity of it. Just like the false talking point that ‘skeptic climate scientists are inconsistent on what they say.’ And it’s just like the talking point that ‘skeptic climate scientists do not deserve fair media balance.’
You: Skeptic scientists have always been consistent on what they say. They’ve never gotten anything remotely approaching ‘fair news media balance.’
Al Gore mob: You’re crazy. Don’t believe your lying eyes if you think you ever saw anything like that. You dreamed it up.
That old unfounded talking point about ‘undeserved media treatment’ has a direct connection to this latest false ‘climate change media coverage is declining’ narrative. When you do check the veracity of these things, that’s where both fall apart, and ultimately point to the core clique of enviro-activists who’ve been promulgating the ‘skeptic scientists on the payroll of Big Oil’ for years‘ accusation for over two decades.
Both of those particular talking points do have kernels of truth to them. The first one concerned network and major newspaper articles about the global warming issue. True, skeptic climate scientists did appear in such venues back in the late 1990s / early 2000s, but they most certainly were not given any semblance of objective, unbiased coverage. They were allowed to offer some input about the science, and then were implied to be shills working on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. One of the reasons I became involved in this issue was the result of my wanting to see if the much-lauded MacNeil / Lehrer NewsHour ever gave genuine fair balance to skeptic scientists in accordance with their own internal journalism guidelines. It turns out that program and its subsequent iterations never did, and still does not to the present day.
The irony here surrounds the current complaints of the news outlets ‘not doing their job.” If the NewsHour and others had actually been giving fair, equal time balance to skeptic climate scientists back when that ‘unfair balance’ talking started gaining news media traction in the 1990s, then it’s possible the climate issue would have died of natural causes within a year or two at the hands of reporters putting out unbiased detailed science examinations, and perhaps even sent into its death throes with help from President Bill Clinton.
Regarding the current talking point about ‘major TV news having supposedly less coverage of the climate issue,’ while that may be plausible with all the overwhelming other news to crowd out the ‘climate crisis,’ the thrust of it is still a disingenuous distraction tactic.
Let me explain how: back in late 2008, I set up an automatic email alert inquiry with Google to show results every day for any story concerning global warming. At that time, I wanted to see if my own very first online article with those specific words in its title. I’ve kept that daily search ever since, it serves an important purpose to show what the trends are in global warming report, and the frequency of repeated talking point stories. I usually zip through them quite fast, open one or two that have some kind of angle worthy of a closer look, then I delete the email. Over the years, multiple blog posts here at GelbspanFiles were a direct result of seeing the topic in my daily alerts stories pile.
On March 11, 2026, I received not just one email from Google with global warming stories results, I received two. The Gismodo website piece about A.I. data centers being a potential gold mine for ‘renewable energy’ was the #5 story in a list of 13 results. What caught my eye about that one was the line within it that Google picked up for its summary bit, namely that “Nobody talks about climate change anymore.”
That was a patently ridiculous claim. Again, that piece was in the second of two email results I received on March 11th. The first Google email results list for global warming stories contained 61 results. For a topic that’s ‘not talked about,’ that’s quite a bit of talking in just one single day.
While I don’t normally get two results lists from Google often at all, the one list I do get is upwards of 40-60 results every day. Every. Single. Day. It’s absolutely endless.
The key, meanwhile, to tying these two ‘unfair media balance’ / ‘falling climate issue coverage’ talking points together is their source for the claims. Having seen that latter talking point one time too many on March 11th, I clicked on one of the stories and immediately recognized the problem, the lead author of the study behind that whole narrative:
That Max Boykoff, the guy I briefly covered way back in August 2010 at the Heartland Institute’s former “Freedom Pub” blog, first in my “The con-senseless for global warming media coverage” post and then in a brief Part II followup.
Let’s revisit that situation in summary form, with new screencaptures today, to drive home a critical point involving the latest tripe about ‘decreasing climate issue coverage.’ Starting with my Part I post:
• In early August 2010, several websites including ClimateDepot, WUWT, and The Hockey Schtick referred to a hugely dubious infographic at the disingenuously-named “SkepticalScience” website (its founder having his own tag category at my blog).
• SkepticalScience’s infographic sourced from a site named “Renegade Conservatory Guy” where its center illustration section claimed that ‘too much media balance was being given to skeptic climate scientists – its source for that claim was “Boykoff 2008.”
• What balance? Just days earlier on July 29, 2010, American Thinker published my article in which I quantified how one major TV news outlet, the PBS NewsHour, had never once permitted fair balance to a skeptic climate scientist.
• As I showed in my 2010 Freedom Pub post, the ‘Renegade Conservatory Guy’ didn’t have a clickable link for “Boykoff 2008,” which I subsequently found to be the “Lost in translation? US TV news coverage of AGW ’95–’04” paper containing the ‘majority balance’ news media figure.
• Boykoff’s paper also contained the following swipe at skeptic climate scientist Dr Patrick Michaels:
“… in July of 2006, ABC News revealed that the Intermountain Rural Electric Association paid $100,000 to climate contrarian Patrick Michaels to downplay human’s role in climate change and confuse public understanding of anthropogenic climate change (Sandell and Blakemore 2006). …”
• Contrary to Max Boykoff’s mistakenly naming the subheading as the citation name, “Sandell and Blakemore 2006” is ABC News journalists Clayton Sandell’s / Bill Blakemore’s August 3, 2006 report “ABC News Reporting Cited As Evidence In Congressional Hearing On Global Warming” (that Bill Blakemore). While the current online form of that old article still contains the reporters’ own swipe at Dr Michaels, for unknown reasons it omits its subheading and is truncated toward near the end. Its offline continuation is preserved, however, at the Internet Archive, where the reporters offered this additional bit:
“This coal industry disinformation campaign is a repeat of a similar campaign launched in the early 1990s by Western Fuels and other coal interests,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Ross Gelbspan.
The credibility of that 2006 ABC News report is out the window on that bit alone. Ross Gelbspan never won a Pulitzer. Gelbspan’s credibility was out the window on his false Pulitzer accolade, along with his false implication that Dr Michaels operated under any kind of industry money to put out disinformation – the ‘leaked memo’ that made Gelbspan famous was never implemented anywhere.
By default, Max Boykoff’s long-ago reliance on the ABC News report – to imply skeptic climate scientists did not deserve fair media balance – threw his credibility out the window as an unbiased researcher. But the problem doesn’t stop there.
Back in my Part II Freedom Pub blog post followup, I pointed out the next fatal fault in his credibility:
• Max Boykoff and his brother wrote a 12-page 2004 paper titled “Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press” where no farther than page 3 they quote Ross Gelbspan on the folly of giving equal weight to skeptic climate scientists. They additionally and prominently thank him for contributions to their paper.
• Ross Gelbspan’s 2004 Boiling Point Chapter 4 “Bad Press” begins with a quote of the Boykoff’s 2004 paper. and in a subsequent quote of them, his endnotes #81 citation source is their 2002 version of the paper that would become the 2004 one immediately above.
That right there is what is known as a circular citation. When people like that cite each other as the source for an assertion, it means neither has the evidence to prove their assertions.
This is the way it is with every angle of the climate issue that even remotely brushes up against the narrative about ‘skeptic climate scientists being corrupt industry shills unworthy of public consideration.’ People can either accept them without question, or they can start chiseling away at any part of these.
Here – is this just some researcher guy revealing disinterest by the news media? No. He’s yet another hapless individual pointing an arrow the size of Texas at where the real disinformation is within the climate issue, and his message is fundamentally disingenuous.
Deceptive, even. ‘News’ coverage of the climate issue is wall-to-wall and increasing across the spectrum of ways people get their ‘news.’
One-sided ‘news,’ I should add. Dare to question any part of it, as I did with a guest post at WUWT on March 18th, and the ‘news system’ today will find ways to suppress it.
