Question: When does a totally unbiased media report actually become biased?

Answer: When it's about climate change.

What's wrong with this picture?

The vast majority of the world's scientists are warning the world to change its ways, while a very small minority are shouting "nonsense". When mainstream reporters approach this topic they feel the need, in a bid to be balanced, to give the minority a voice. This is at it should be. The consequence of this balancing act, however, is an unwary public can be left with the impression the scales are fairly evenly weighted.

A new study has found that when it comes to U.S. media coverage of global warming , superficial balance—telling "both" sides of the story—can actually be a form of informational bias. Despite the consistent assertions of the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that human activities have had a "discernible" influence on the global climate and that global warming is a serious problem that must be addressed immediately, "he said/she said" reporting allowed a small group of global warming skeptics to have their views greatly amplified....

In 1996, the Society of Professional Journalists removed the term "objectivity" from its ethics code (Columbia Journalism Review , 7-8/03). This reflects the fact that many contemporary journalists find the concept to be an unrealistic description of what journalists aspire to, preferring instead words like "fairness," "balance," "accuracy," "comprehensiveness" and "truth." In terms of viewpoints presented, journalists are taught to abide by the norm of balance: identifying the most dominant, widespread positions and then telling "both" sides of the story.

According to media scholar Robert Entman, "Balance aims for neutrality. It requires that reporters present the views of legitimate spokespersons of the conflicting sides in any significant dispute, and provide both sides with roughly equal attention."

Balanced coverage does not, however, always mean accurate coverage. In terms of the global warming story, "balance" may allow skeptics—many of them funded by carbon-based industry interests—to be frequently consulted and quoted in news reports on climate change. Ross Gelbspan, drawing from his 31-year career as a reporter and editor, charges in his books The Heat Is On and Boiling Point that a failed application of the ethical standard of balanced reporting on issues of fact has contributed to inadequate U.S. press coverage of global warming:

The professional canon of journalistic fairness requires reporters who write about a controversy to present competing points of view. When the issue is of a political or social nature, fairness—presenting the most compelling arguments of both sides with equal weight—is a fundamental check on biased reporting. But this canon causes problems when it is applied to issues of science. It seems to demand that journalists present competing points of view on a scientific question as though they had equal scientific weight, when actually they do not.

We empirically tested Gelbspan's hypothesis as we focused on the human contribution to global warming (known in science as "anthropogenic global warming"). In our study called "Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S. Prestige Press"—presented at the 2002 Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change in Berlin and published in the July 2004 issue of the journal Global Environmental Change —we analyzed articles about human contributions to global warming that appeared between 1988 and 2002 in the U.S. prestige press: the New York Times , Washington Post , Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal .

Using the search term "global warming," we collected articles from this time period and focused on what is considered "hard news," excluding editorials, opinion columns, letters to the editor and book reviews. Approximately 41 percent of articles came from the New York Times , 29 percent from the Washington Post , 25 percent from the Los Angeles Times , and 5 percent from the Wall Street Journal .

From a total of 3,543 articles, we examined a random sample of 636 articles. Our results showed that the majority of these stories were, in fact, structured on the journalistic norm of balanced reporting, giving the impression that the scientific community was embroiled in a rip-roaring debate on whether or not humans were contributing to global warming....

Through statistical analyses, we found that coverage significantly diverged from the IPCC consensus on human contributions to global warming from 1990 through 2002. In other words, through adherence to the norm of balance, the U.S. press systematically proliferated an informational bias. - FAIR

Duelling scientists - that's a visualisation sure to suck the life out of many a conservation effort. "Heck - wake me up when they're sure!"

This issue is fueling the growth of the environmental blogging community, as people take it upon themselves to get the message across. A bit of a revolution, you could say. Some mainstream reporters regard bloggers as uncouth vigilantes - fostering a mob mindset - wielding undeserved and unbestowed powers.

Last month Joseph Rago, from the Wall Street Journal, threw a virtual grenade at the blogging ranks:

The Blog Mob - " Written by fools to be read by imbeciles."

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps....

A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion....

Nobody wants to be an imbecile. Part of it, I think, is that everyone likes shows and entertainments. Mobs are exciting. People also like validation of what they already believe; the Internet, like all free markets, has a way of gratifying the mediocrity of the masses. - WSJ

I imagine that's one story the WSJ has been tempted to pull from their site - and the four comments they allowed through were likely just a smattering of the number they actually received in response to these elitist statements (my own at least, and those of several others I know, didn't past muster). And, this is exactly where blogging has some substance and weight - as its very nature invites feedback. If technology has pulled people out of community town hall meetings, fostering television-fed apathy amongst its citizenry, then blogging technology is bringing them back.

If a blog has any kind of readership, incorrect or unbalanced reporting is quickly met with checks and balances, or even a scathing rebuke. If I put forward an unsound case, I'll be dragged over the coals soon enough - having to reshape my views and restate my case. But that's the aim - right? We live and learn.

A blogger, for the moment at least, is allowed to have an opinion. The whole bouncing-ideas-around process, should, with enough community input, spit out a balanced result - and hopefully a result devoid of industry-financed influences. You never know, we might even accomplish something - even if we don't know what 'solipsistic' and 'logorrheic' mean. :)

Oh... unless you all disagree, of course...

 

The Last DJ - Tom Petty    Well you can't turn him into a company man You can't turn him into a whore And the boys upstairs just don't understand anymore Well the top brass don't like him talking so much, And he won't play what they say to play And he don't want to change what don't need to change There goes the last DJ Who plays what he wants to play And says what he wants to say, hey hey hey And there goes your freedom of choice There goes the last human voice There goes the last DJ