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The mainstream media are aghast that nearly everyone thinks they’re liars.
They’re going to have to learn to live with it. The AUT Centre for Journalism Media and Democracy’s annual survey shows a sustained and rapid decline in New Zealanders’ trust in the media. Similar results apply around the world.
Yet, far from admitting why they’ve blown the public’s trust, the mainstream media are doubling down. In collusion with demented leftoids like the so-called “Disinformation Project”, they point the finger at you, you wicked, right-wing extremist. How dare you believe that the media and government lied at nearly every turn of the Covid pandemic, are still lying through their teeth about climate change, and have long abandoned sober reporting in favour of demented cheerleading.
Above all, how dare you suspect that the worst purveyors of actual misinformation are the very people who claim loudest to be “fighting” it.
Some of the most damaging misinformation is delivered by trusted experts trying to reinforce political false narratives national governments find appealing.
Sure, your nutty mate might bang on about aliens using 5G towers to corrupt our precious bodily fluids, but who really takes any notice? On the other hand, when the mainstream media tell what even they know are lies about Covid, a still-too-sizeable minority will steadfastly believe them.
Think of the latest revelations in this column a fortnight ago and by this paper’s Sharri Markson on Saturday July 29 about private communications between scientists working to debunk the Covid-19 laboratory leak theory. These scientists were working on behalf of US National Institutes of Health director Anthony Fauci in February and March 2020 trying to disprove lab origin, even though their private communications indicate they thought a lab leak very plausible.
As it happens, Fauci spoke at a virtual panel in Australia and did a round of media appearances in this country. You’d think that, if journalists in this country really did believe in “speaking truth to power”, they’d have had plenty of tough questions for him.
Sure.
As you’ve no doubt predicted, Fauci got lathered with the softest soap imaginable.
Neither RN host Patricia Karvelas nor Sydney Morning Herald health writer Angus Thomson mentioned the lab leak in pieces that ran respectively on July 28 and July 27. Thomson even led his story with Fauci’s praise for Australia rejecting conspiracy theories about scientists working on the pandemic. Never mind those scientists had already been publicly revealed in a US congressional hearing to have had concerns the virus might indeed have been created in a lab – a lab in Wuhan partly funded by Fauci.
When it comes to climate change, the mainstream media gave up any pretence of objectivity over a decade ago. Now, they openly tell us they’ll only report one narrative — and expect us to applaud that as a virtue.
Environment reporters slavishly repeat the inane slogans of UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres who dominated headlines here with a foolish claim the world had moved from the era of global warming “to the era of global boiling”. By now even the dumbest environment writer should be able to tell when global temperatures are up because of an El Nino weather pattern.
In truth, global average daily temperature the week Guterres made his silly statement was 17.2c. Boiling point is 100c.
The wall-to-wall screeching hyperbole about “record temperatures” was rubbished even by mainstream climate scientists. As one pointed out, far from a 100,000-year record, temperatures this northern summer were likely not even the equal of the late 1930s.
Even the head of the IPCC itself tries in vain to dampen the demented bellowing of the media.
A far more newsworthy statement was made the same week by the new head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change but ignored by most climate writers. Scottish scientist Professor Jim Skea told German newspaper Der Spiegel it was wrong for climate scientists “to imply temperature increases of 1.5C posed an existential threat to humanity”.
The rise in temperature since pre-industrial time is 1.1C, so 2030 “doomers” such as Greta Thunberg are in effect arguing that an extra 0.4C will cause a global extinction crisis. No serious scientist believes it and no IPCC report argues it. Yet Guardian Australia, the ABC and the Nine papers report this misinformation regularly.
When it comes to climate derangement, though, that’s just the start. As I’ve written many times, the numbers not only just don’t add up, on “Net Zero”, they’re almost beyond belief.
The latest Net Zero Australia policy group estimate of the costs of new poles and wires, wind turbines, solar farms and battery and pumped hydro storage is between $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion by 2030. That hits up to $9 trillion by 2060. But journalists keep repeating Labor’s line – disinformation – that renewables are the cheapest form of energy […]
There are a few facts all science writers and good editors should know. Cold weather kills far more people annually than heat. The IPCC has for years made it clear individual weather events cannot be linked to climate change. NASA satellite records prove the area of the globe affected annually by forest fires continues to fall, even during the 2019-20 bushfire season here and in this northern hemisphere fire season.
The Australian
This makes it all a strange coincidence that the Albanese government wants to specifically exempt the mainstream media from its proposed “misinformation” laws.
