The Media and Manufacturing Doubt?

• Have public media and journalists contributed to confusion and doubt about climate change? What can/should they do to present science and scientific debate accurately on this topic?

In Merchants of Doubt, considerable writing is done on the role of the media in presenting information or mis-information, really, to the climate change “debate.” The ideas presented by the authors are that 1) all media is politically biased towards one or an other party’s platform and 2) the media tries to devote equal time towards the climate change subject implying to the public that there is still DEBATE about the subject when the authors emphasize that since the 1990s there has been a general scientific consensus that climate change IS occurring and 3) scientific summaries are not written directly by scientists, they are written by government agencies with agendas and money from opposing ideological groups. All of these portrayals of global warming (and other environmental issues like acid rain and the ozone hole covered by Oreskes and Conway) involve manipulating the inherent “wall” between the world of the hard and definite scientific process and the agendas individual political organizations and media groups wish the general public to think, keeping them contributing to the oil and coal industries, etc.

One would think that in a capitalistic and political driven country such as the US, there would be no way to regulate, per se, how the media could contribute to an accurate portrayal of the climate change issue. Unless peer reviewed scientific summaries could be released to the public and widely advertized and circulated in an accessible journal, much the same way The New York Times is, for example, then people could better inform themselves of the TRUE scientific consensus among real experts.

However, untainted, un-politicized, un-funded, clear, and honest writing doesn’t seem plausible—and this is where the authors really emphasis that it becomes up to the general public to educate THEMSELVES on these issues, analyze accurate, unbiased, and real sources to find the true data. If this were to occur, then the issues of media portraying climate change as something other than what scientists claim it is, would disappear, and the responsibility to spread the truth would be in our hands.