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December 9, 2009
Jonathon Green, ex Crikey editor, promised that the ABC's new online portal The Drum would provide quality and professional commentary-based journalism:
This is not news, this is not opinion, this is thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis. We'll be taking the issues and ideas that count and digging a little deeper into and around them. Looking for a real sense of understanding.
This, he added, would involve analytic takes on the world and events around us by taking a set of facts or known circumstances and holding them up to the light... then having a chat about it.
Well, let's have a chat about a particular piece they published yesterday. This is Kill the IPPC article by Bob Carter on Unleashed, which is part of The Drum's stable and so presumably, falls under its journalistic ethos. Carter asserts or claims that:
the study of climate change, under the aegis of "dangerous global warming caused by human carbon dioxide emissions," has long since been captured by the small group of well connected, well networked and well funded atmospheric scientists and computer modellers who advise the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and whose nearly every utterance confirms their ignorance of the true course of climate history and change on our planet - a topic that is the domain of geologists, not meteorologists and computer jockeys.
It's a big claim: nearly every utterance of IPCC confirms their ignorance of the true course of climate history and change on our planet. There is no argument argument to justify this claim of "nearly every utterance." No facts are given.
We are merely offered an interpretation of the Climategate affair without any attempt to deal with the different interpretations of the significance of these leaked emails that challenge Carter's corruption thesis. The latter implies that science and policy is based on what is said in personal emails from people who are developing some sort of scientific story, rather than the literature that appears in peer-reviewed journals.
This is not holding things up to the light. It is chasing shadows inside the cave. This is more holding things up to the light in the context of thoughtful and informed analysis.
Carter then says this:
Behind the corrupted science of Climategate and the fall of the IPCC, then, lie two things. The first is the degradation, mainly by political interference, of research conditions and practices within modern government-funded research groups. The second is the power and financial clout of the modern, ecoevangelistic Green movement, egged on by crusading media reporters and editors. The world has probably never before seen a propaganda and political machine that is as well oiled, well funded and well organized as this modern army of apocalyptics and their media flag-wavers.
He ends by saying that the siren song of the Greens imperils both our standard of living and, ironically, the state of our natural environment.
The fall of the IPC is the inference! That conclusion merely rephrases the initial assertion that nearly every utterance of IPCC confirms their ignorance of the true course of climate history and change on our planet.
So much for the ABC's "thoughtful" analysis. This is a polemic that belongs on the pages of The Australian appealing to, and stirring up, its populist conservative base. Green knows from his experience at Crikey that this is junk analysis, so they are consciously running the junk under the banner of "thought-provoking" to establish their profile in the digital market place.
Does the ABC need to do tabloid to establish its digital commentary brand and to drum up an audience? My take is that in letting Carter's article through it has undermined the values of professional journalism about objectivity (broadly understood) that it professes to uphold.
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Well said sir!