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.”
I posed that very question to the journalist behind the April 26, 2025 Arizona Republic newspaper article, “How journalists help readers understand climate change’s local effects,” an angle of which concerns what I brought up in paragraph five of the email below. Since the Arizona Republic did not offer any email address for the journalist, while searching for her name in connection with an online-published email address, I turned up another of her same-day April 26th reports, “Environmental journalists face challenges in retaliatory Trump era,” in which the article brought Amy Westervelt as a person urging [enviro] “journalists to support one another.” As regular readers here at GelbspanFiles may already know, yeah, that Westervelt, who has her own tag category here of blog posts mentioning her in a prominent way. Would Westervelt support any journalist who dares to question the idea of ‘industry-paid skeptic scientist liars’? No, probably the opposite would happen.
Therein lies the real problem for real journalists. As I’ve said a few times before here in this blog, I don’t just write about the faults in the “crooked skeptic scientists” accusations, I try to get something done about that. What follows is my verbatim initial email to the Arizona Republic journalist — and to her immense credit, she replied today, April 30th with “Thank you so much for the information, I will dig deeper into these stories. Will she? At what possible peril to her career if she does in an unbiased, objective level?
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Subject line: Your combo “How journos help readers understand climate change..” / “Enviro journos face challenges in retaliatory Trump era” — a potential eye-opener
Ms Hartley,
A potential eye-opener not for me, but for you. I’ve been writing about the climate issue for over a decade, your first story came to me via my daily alert from Google on any story about global warming. I created the alert after my very first online piece was published to see if it got any media traction, and I’ve kept the alerts ever since. Since the AZ Republic listed no email contact for you, I did a search for it, and found your other day-old AZ Republic piece, which mentioned Amy Westervelt as “executive director of the journalism organization Drilled.”
The potential eye-opener for you concerns the overarching premise in your first article where you may be entirely unaware of an angle of it you missed, and regarding your second piece, how you have what you describe exactly entirely backwards – in such a manner that it would affect your own journalism reporting if you were to pursue it.
In your first piece, the premise is that journalists – the legacy news media, for lack of a better description – tell the story of the climate issue to readers. The reality here is . . . they do not. This is not an idle observation of mine, I’ve quantified the lack of the complete telling since 2010 as it concerns the PBS NewsHour, via a running count of its news broadcast transcripts. They operate on the basis that “the science is settled by science consensus” and only mention skeptic climate scientists in conjunction with the notion that those skeptics are paid industry money to deliberately deceive the public by ‘undercutting the consensus.’ Problem is, skeptics will say that consensus is the business of politics, not science, and that the notion of ‘majority opinion’ validating science conclusions is a basic logical fallacy.
Skeptics of catastrophic man-caused global warming could offer you levels of detail on how the IPCC reports are faulty that would give you a migraine headache from trying to absorb it all. I’ve witness those presentations firsthand. My inadvertent specialty is how that other latter talking point – ‘industry-paid liars for hire‘ – falls apart.
Regarding your first piece, did you know the Society of Environmental Journalists was founded on the core idea that skeptic climate scientists do not deserve fair media balance, a slap in the face to a core tenet of journalism? I covered that in some detail back in 2014, Turner Broadcasting’s Teya Ryan espoused it at the formation of the SEJ, basically out of the rationale of climate scientist Dr Stephen Schneider, ex-Boston Globe journalist Ross Gelbspan later expanded on it, and gained much fame from that. The PBS NewsHour, by excluding the skeptic side of the issue entirely from their broadcasts, egregiously breaks the journalism guideline on the matter created by one their founding anchormen.
Regarding your other piece and its mention of Amy Westervelt — if she was a true journalist, she would have questioned her “Drilled” guest Kert Davies concerning his assertions about the notorious “reposition global warming” memos and the notorious “victory will be achieved” memos being ‘smoking evidence’ of industry-led disinformation campaigns, and she would have asked Mr Davies if it was a problem that Ross Gelbspan, noted in connection to the”reposition global warming” memos, had been exposed as committing one of the bigger acts of ‘stolen journalism valor.’ But she did not. Neither memo set was ever implemented anywhere by anybody, and, despite Gelbspan’s own self-proclaimed “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize” label, he never won a Pulitzer. You can easily confirm that last item for yourself – enter the name Ross Gelbspan into the search window at Pulitzer.org.
Naomi Oreskes speaks of Amy Westervelt as a good friend and colleague (3:58 point here). Did you know that Oreskes has every appearance in the world of fabricating her story of how she came to know who the ‘merchants of doubt’ were? Again, if Westervelt was a true journalist, she would have reported how Oreskes’ heroine narrative and enslavement to the very same worthless memos that Kert Davies spoke of are career-ending faults.
This is where the true eye-opener may be for you: the premise of your second piece about the ‘Trump intimidation’ of sources who’d be willing to speak to journalists on the ‘climate issue’ is essentially one-sided ‘journalism’ and it’s entirely backwards. The sources who’d be more than glad to offer huge levels of science-based material are the skeptic climate scientists and related skeptic experts who’ve been shunned by the legacy news media for approaching thirty years now. But what happens to you as a reporter who dares to question any angle of all you’ve been taught on the climate issue?
Would you find yourself expelled from your journalism school for pointing out that the top-most promulgators of the “settled science” / “crooked skeptic scientists” narratives have crippling faults in their assertions? If you asked the AZ Republic, Joan Meiners et al., why they do not offer objective coverage of the skeptic side of the issue, would you find yourself being told to shut up about it if you want to keep reporting for the AZ Republic? If you simply told Amy Westervelt that Naomi Oreskes and the late Ross Gelbspan and Kert Davies are deserving of deep unbiased investigation to find out how they all came into possession of the “reposition global warming” memos . . . . is it not plausible that Westervelt would say she’ll make sure you will never work in the journalism profession if you pursue that angle?
See the problem there?
If I may suggest it, you likely know little or actually nothing about the skeptic side of the issue because your journalism professors never told you a thing about it, and if you actually believe that skeptic scientists were paid a million bucks – that’s what the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits claim – to spread lies, it’s because you never questioned a thing about those accusations. One of the two people behind the accusation about “1.2 million bucks” has himself been paid nearly $25 million. What happens if you start asking rough questions about that particular angle of the climate issue?
The first question you may want to ask, however — are you a real journalist who has no fear of questioning authority ……….. or are you a propagandist who repeats what you are told to repeat, under the threat that you will not continue to work in the profession if you fail to obey that directive?
When you yourself are unafraid to pose tough questions, that’s what freedom of the press looks like. When you face the prospect of being expelled from school and prevented from pursuing your chosen career, that’s the very situation of intimidation implied in your second piece. Retaliatory tyranny.
– Russell Cook
GelbspanFiles.com