With the far larger question of whether a genuine journalist’s own freedom of the press is in peril if he or she starts asking rough questions concerning any angle of the orthodoxy of “the science of man-caused global warming is settled” / “skeptic climate scientists are on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry to undercut the settled science.” Continue reading
Category Archives: mainstream media reporting
Committing Acts of Journalism
My transcriptions of several segments of a TV interview makes this blog post a long one. They’re necessary to drive home a critical point: The ‘climate crisis’ is not an existential threat to the well-being of the country; journalism malfeasance on the part of the legacy news media is the actual threat. Bits in the old interview are a driving force in the climate issue today. Continue reading
New York Times 2/16/24: ‘Ross Gelbspan, Who Exposed Roots of Climate Change Deniers, Dies at 84’
The NYT obituary for Ross Gelbspan is here here (full text archive link here in case the main article ends up behind partial preview login wall). The Washington Post obituary is here: “Ross Gelbspan, author who probed roots of climate change denial, dies at 84.” (also archived here). If you want a window into the world of how mainstream media news in the United States now operates, look no further than these obituaries – on what they told and what they omitted. Continue reading
A. – somewhat lacking in – I. “Exposing the Influence: Skeptic Climate Scientists and Fossil Fuel Funding”
As I’ve said many times here at GelbspanFiles, no matter where you go in the angles of narratives from prominent people about ‘liars-for-hire scientists on the payroll of Big Coal & Oil’ you’ll see the accusations are only separated by three degrees or less from Ross Gelbspan’s beloved accusation which launched his second career. Add “Artificial Intelligence” to that list of prominent accusers. At the end of this post, I’ll point out a bigger problem with this development. Continue reading
Beware These 6 Outright Clima-Disinformation™ bits when you’re told to “Beware These 10 Climate Myths”
As ever, one of the hallmarks of far-left enviro-activists is their psychological projection, where they ought to just wear a huge sign saying “what I accuse others of doing is exactly what I do myself.” I’ve covered Mark Hertsgaard here at GelbspanFiles before, so I shouldn’t be surprised that he and his Covering Climate Now (CCN) efforts continue to be a one-trick pony show where he is enslaved to repeating “Pulitzer-Winning journalist” Ross Gelbspan’s decades-old attack about skeptic climate scientists being paid fossil fuel industry money to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” – Hertsgaard began his current career track doing exactly that back in 1997. It was a myth back then that Gelbspan had won a Pulitzer and was an even bigger myth concerning Gelbspan’s outright false accusation that skeptic climate scientists were paid and/or instructed to reposition anything. But Hertsgaard persists in keeping the glory of Gelbspan’s fake news alive to this day. Witness the following Continue reading
Open letter to LynnJohnson.News, re “ye olde” Reposition Global Warming as Theory ‘leaked memos’
Can’t emphasize this enough, a particular set of literally worthless, unsolicited, never implemented (never implemented!) set of ‘leaked industry memos’ is so pervasive among enviro-activists that it came up as recently as two weeks ago as a false premise setup at a so-called ‘news’ post about sustainable biodiversity.
What follows is my comment suggestion I sent to the alleged ‘reporter’ at that site.
People of the State of California v. Exxon Mobil Corporation
Throw another one onto the “growing number” (growing number!) of “Exxon Knew”-style lawsuits which insinuate that ‘Big Oil’ knew the burning of fossil fuels harmed the environment but deceived the public by employing ‘shill’ climate scientists in ‘disinformation campaigns’ to say there was no harm. This latest Sept 15, 2023 filing appears to be no different than the 31 other “Exxon Knew” lawsuits I’ve dissected where it fits a pattern of repeating (plagiarizing?) material out of the others, from dubious ‘science certainty’ assertions to corruption accusations worded carelessly enough that they potentially stray into reckless disregard territory. I’ll get into how this latest one fits that pattern, but first, let me illustrate how the ‘news reports’ about it reinforce the problem that we no longer have an objective news reporting media, we have a propaganda media telling the public – working at the most basic of intellectually dishonest levels – about these lawsuits. Continue reading
DailyClout: A Letter to the Editor: “When the MSM Misleads about January 6th, What Other Disinformation Do They Push?”
Note: I tipped Naomi Wolf to the two specific items below after I read her “Dear Conservatives” article, and she asked to compile my pair of tips into an 800 word submission to her DailyClout website, where it was published after a bit of a delay on March 24th.
To the Editor:
Dr. Naomi Wolf, who nobody would term as a right-wing zealot, admitted to being misled about the January 6 Capitol riot (“Dear conservatives, I’m sorry I believed so many media lies”), noting how the man with the face paint and Viking horns hat is revealed in never-seen footage inside the Capitol being tranquilly led around in the building by Capitol police; he’s not the violent insurrection leader the mainstream media portrayed him to be.
There’s more: namely, the basic question of why MSM reporters never asked how or why that man, previously seen in 2019 as a prominent climate strike march leader, switched his political viewpoints 180° just over a year. Surely they’d use that to illustrate how persuasive “right-wing propaganda” can be.
This lack of curiosity by the MSM doesn’t end there. Dr. Wolf’s realization that the MSM is less-than-forthcoming on particular information was quite abrupt. My distrust of the news media grew over years.
Ultimately, this is all about asking tough questions. During my youth in the ’70s through the ’90s, journalists could be counted on to question authority. These days, not so much.
Allow me to illustrate via my own questions concerning the ‘climate crisis’ issue.
Covering Climate Now, 3/2/23: ‘Fox News Lies About Elections & Repositions Global Warming as Theory (Not Fact).’
For any of the folks at last week’s Heartland Institute climate conference (and any others I’ve contacted recently) who heard me say the worthless “reposition global warming” ‘leaked industry memos’ is the literal best ammunition that enviro-activist accusers have in their arsenal as evidence that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns, that was no exaggeration. And as we all know, the primary hallmark of far leftists is the way they project their mindset onto the people they accuse of treachery, so when we see the Covering Climate Now group, a supplier of biased, one-sided climate info to 500+ news media outlets, publish a March 2 “FOX Doesn’t Just Lie About Elections” hit piece castigating the Fox News network with a subheadline that reads ….
The network is part of a climate disinformation ecosystem that journalism has to confront.
…. it is an arrow the size of Texas pointing to who it actually is who spews disinformation and who should be exposed for exactly what they are doing. Especially when Covering Climate Now feels totally compelled to support their accusation with ye olde “reposition global warming” memos that date all the way back to when the co-founder of CCNow first used them in a pure disinformation effort back in 1997. That’s how old this pathetic effort is, and why I put the comical “ye olde” modifying noun in front of those memos’ notorious name.
Has the prophecy at the end of “3 Days of the Condor” come true?
I watched a replay of the “3 Days of the Condor” movie starring Robert Redford and Cliff Robertson Thursday night. That 1975 movie is so old that it is from the era when the mainstream media was pretty much above sheer partisan bias and would report government abuse and overreach in a heartbeat, no matter the origins of such treachery. The elemental plot of the movie is that Robert Redford’s character, Joe Turner (code name Condor) is a low-level CIA worker doing no more than fiction book research to cross-check it against actual CIA activity. After all of his co-workers are assassinated, he ultimately uncovers essentially a ‘rogue CIA’ within the CIA that operates above all authority. Good U.S. patriot that he is, he leaks all of these details at the end of the movie to the New York Times — because, as we all knew in 1975, the investigative mainstream media’s job was to report when top level authorities were not operating in the best interests of the public. And nobody in America lived in fear of their own government.
Think about that these days, and what the traditional, legacy mainstream media does not tell the public: Continue reading