Media Misbehaving
Remember the crux of this issue. The theory has been falsified and without correlation you cannot have causation.
Introduction
How do we become informed about all that is happening in our world? Ask yourself the question – “From where did I get my knowledge?” For most of our knowledge, the answer is simple.
In our formative years, we had two major sources of information – our parents and the teachers in the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors of the education system. Once employed, we learnt ‘specialist’ knowledge about our area of work or the industry in which we worked. Most of this knowledge is gained early in our life.
For the remainder of our life, the ‘non specialist’ knowledge about the world is generally received from the Media. Think of all the conversations initiated with the following opening phrases: “Did you see on the TV”, “Did you hear on the radio”, or “Did you read in the newspaper”. It is the Media that provides most of our knowledge about the world after our initial ‘education’1.
You might argue that another major source of information comes from your friends and colleagues, but we would suggest that most of this knowledge was relayed knowledge obtained from the same four sources of information that has informed you.
This page of the website focuses on the Media as it provides, for most people, the majority of their knowledge about the world for the longest period of their lives.
When you see media reports about areas in which you are knowledgeable (e.g. your work area, or industry), you find that many of them are misleading or wrong. This encourages you and others to caution people about the veracity of media reports by saying “You should not believe everything you read in the paper”.
However, unfortunately, we never seem to follow our own good advice. We go through life sceptical about media reports in our areas of expertise, yet believing the bulk of all other media reports. It will take another expert in another area to tell us that the media is wrong, before we show any scepticism of reports outside our own area of expertise.
The Media in most western nations are commercial entities that have to make a profit to survive. Therefore, they are in the business of selling ‘good stories’. If their stories are ‘bland’ or ‘boring’, the consumers will stop watching, listening, or buying their papers, and the media outlet will go out of business.
Consequently, when there are no ‘good stories’ available, the Media will not hesitate to spin, twist, or fabricate stories that will sell for them. In such cases, it will be pure happenstance if the story is accurately portrayed, or is factual.
We should never forget that the Media has a vested interest in making money for their owners, and we should never delude ourselves that they hold any idealistic goals such as those held by say Clark Kent and Lois Lane!
Notes 1. Of course, you can self educate yourself in an area that interests you, but this will only be one additional area, out of hundreds of available areas. Very few people self educate themselves in many areas of interest.
MEDIA MISBEHAVING
A Very Brief History
In “The Swamp” pages of this website, several Readings highlighted several deceptions tools that have been used regularly by the Media since their creation hundreds of years ago. They will not hesitate to manipulate their readers or viewers. This trait of deception increased when the Media drifted from a role of ‘merely reporting’ other peoples views and actions and decided to follow and reinforce their own agendas. So stories were “spun” to support their survival (i.e turn boring into exciting) and to support their agendas (i.e. the creation of left and right wing media organisations).
An offshoot from the Media industry was the Marketing industry – another industry built around deception and misdirection of consumers.
Then the next iteration was the creation of the Public Relations industry often employing staff from the Media and Marketing industries. By 1970, any organisation, when interacting with the Media, found that they would no longer be ‘reported’ on accurately or fairly. The employees or the organisations’ public image would be unfairly besmirched at any time.
To prevent this happening, organisations started hiring professional public relations people to minimise damage caused by the Media. So now we had public relations professionals “spinning” tales to the Media who had invented “spinning” in the first place. Ironically and hypocritically you will still see the Media complaining about other organisations using ‘spin’ against the Media.
A senior executive of a large organisation was taking a “Media Awareness” course. The lecturers came from the Media with most coming from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Two thirds of the way through the course they were told how to react if their organisation was falsely accused of some “heinous crime”. There was only one way to deal with it.
Senior management had to go to the Media admit to the crime, apologise to all concerned and say that it would never happen again. One student pointed out that not only that was unfair but now the organisation was lying to the public. Satirically, he postulated if we had been falsely accused of raping the Queen’s Corgis, we had to admit to that crime, apologise to the Corgis and the Queen and tell her and the World that it would not happen again. He said his organisation would never do that.
The lecture room went quiet and without a smile in the room an ABC lecturer said very quietly “If you you don’t do that, we will crucify you. If you continue to fight we will destroy your organisation within a few months”. All the other lecturers nodded in agreement.
Welcome to the power of the Western Media. Note the injustice and the lack of morality in this situation, where an individual or an organisation can be bullied into lying to the public and, in doing so, enhance the reputation of the Media to strengthen the myth that the Media “keeps the bastards honest and you can only trust us”.
Are we truly a rational society?
THE MEDIA REPORTING ON CLIMATE CHANGE
The remainder of the readings in this section portray some of the misbehaviour of the Media in the reporting on global warming. After digesting the Readings about the Media, you may lose faith in the Media’s ability to keep us well informed.
Reading 5.3.1 is a good introduction to the Media Misbehaving. Has the Media done a good job reporting on the changes in our climate for the past 120 years or have we seen 120 years of misinformation? Or has the Media been alarmist to help them sell newspapers or gain audiences?
Has it been balanced – reporting on both sides of an issue? Have they ever reported on what to expect with normal climate change so we could identify what is abnormal?
Or have their commercial imperatives undermined their professional standards of reporting? You be the judge after digesting Reading 5.3.1.
Not all Readings are of the same value. However this one (Reading 5.3.1) is very important and should not be skipped.
Because every person or organisation can make an error, choosing examples of the Media misbehaving can be rebutted as a ‘one off’ that shows very little. So we will start off with three examples where an issue has been misreported or not reported at all for more than forty years. After that, there will be several Readings showing a potpourri of examples of poor behaviour of the Media.
Conventional Power Cooling Towers
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Western governments required all conventional power plants to filter out any pollutants that were being vented into the atmosphere. For the past forty years, conventional power stations have, in effect, not emitted any pollutants. The only visible “emission” is steam which passes out of cooling towers. On reaching the cooler air outside the cooling towers this steam condenses and forms a “white cloud”. On further cooling a hundred metres away, this “white cloud” disappears as the steam reverts to water vapour which is invisible.
The Green Movement and a compliant Media wish to vilify conventional power generation as dirty, filthy or use any other weaponised word to convince people that the plants needed to be shut down. For years, article after article discussed how conventional plants were ‘belching out’ millions of tons of pollutants every day as shown in a photograph of cooling towers releasing steam.
After a decade, some readers were realising this deceit, so photographs of the plants were then taken ‘backlit’ (i.e. looking past the plant into the sun). This gave the impression the white steam was indeed black smoke filled with pollutants. That deceit didn’t last for too many years either, so the Greens decided to “Photoshop” the photos of the plants and ‘paint’ into the picture black soot filled smoke coming out of the “chimneys” and then forming a dark cloud over the plant.
Initially, the public thought the Media had made an innocent error. However, after hundreds of complaints were made to the Media and no corrections were made it became obvious the Media was lying to us. That lying, by both the Greens and the Media, has now gone on for forty years.
The left hand column of the photographs below shows three clean power plants operating normally. The right hand column of photographs are the same plants with the doctored changes added to show that they are dirty. All these photographs were published in the Media.
Most of this deception was undertaken by the Greens and uncritically published by the Media. However if they did not have a doctored photograph, Media personnel photo-shopped their own pictures – sometimes very crudely.
The last photo in the right column was doctored by a Melbourne newspaper. You might note that the black smoke starts where the steam disappears rather than at the top of the “smoke stack” – which, in reality, is a cooling tower.
In May 2020, the Hazelwood power station was demolished and our wonderful Media couldn’t help themselves as they continued to deceive us. Most decided to describe the eight cooling towers being demolished as “chimneys”. A chimney is a “pipe which conducts smoke and combustion gases up from a fire or furnace and typically through the roof of a building“. A cooling tower is not a chimney.
Use of the word “chimney” evokes the idea of smoke, soot, pollution, black and dirty, which helps sell the Green’s incorrect view of conventional power stations. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s conventional power stations have removed all pollutants including smoke soot etc and the only visible emission left is water vapour which can look like white smoke.
So after forty years of misidentifying cooling towers the Media continue to deliberately deceive us. Would you expect the Media to call transmission towers, telecommunication towers and the Eiffel Tower a chimney? No.
So why call a cooling tower a chimney? To mislead us because we are so gullible.
So here we have the outcome of a “Marriage in Hell” where, for their own survival, two organisations have to fabricate alarming stories to ensure money flows into their coffers. Ironically, the Media who tells us that they always “seek out the truth and are the only organisations in our society that can be trusted” has lied to us about this for forty years.
The Green Movement is the Media’s ‘golden goose’ producing alarming stories. You will rarely, or never, hear the Media criticise their golden goose irrespective of how badly their goose is behaving.
Melting Arctic Ice
For forty years, the Greens have been telling us when the floating Arctic ice melts there will be catastrophic sea level rises. A school student who has studied the buoyancy laws can tell you that is a lie. We can confirm this in our own kitchen.
However, both the Green Movement and the Media have repeated this lie so often that it has become a factoid – something that is wrong that is repeated so often that most believe it is a fact. Both organisations have been repeatedly shown why this is wrong, yet they continue to publish it. We cannot interpret this behaviour in any other way – both organisations are lying to us.
Once again, both organisations keep telling us “Trust us we are the only ones who are telling you the truth.” Most of the Media cannot be trusted to leave the gold in their grandmother’s teeth – so why should we trust them with this ‘track record’.
Past Green Failures
Quite correctly, the Media devotes time in ensuring the taxpayers’ money is spent well by the government. They investigate large and small government projects highlighting any irregularities. They even “hunt down” individuals who might have misspent a few thousand dollars of the taxpayers’ money. This is laudable even when, on some occasions, they are over zealous.
In the past seventy years the Green Movement has run more than half a dozen campaigns demanding the government spend billions of dollars on each campaign. However, in each campaign their alarmist predictions have never come true and most of the expenditure has been wasted. One would have thought that a professional Media would have investigated this in some depth, since so much taxpayers’ money was wasted. The Media will never investigate its ‘spouse’, especially in her role as the Media’s ‘golden goose’.
Similarly, when a new Green campaign is launched, we might expect a professional Media to remind us of all the failed campaigns and the wasted billions of dollars. We then might be a little more educated about the risks of embracing the new campaign.
Instead the Media hides the past Green failures and we are encouraged to blindly and unthinkingly follow the Greens’ “pied piper” into the next campaign.
We are rarely, if ever, alerted to the vested interest that both these organisations have in misleading us in each campaign. This misbehaviour has been going on for seventy years.
OTHER READINGS
There are hundreds of examples in the past forty years showing the poor behaviour of the Media when reporting on this issue. They are often just plain wrong. If not wrong, they will not hesitate to describe something ‘normal’ as ‘abnormal’ and then make the courageous jump by assuming it is the fault of Man and his carbon dioxide. They will grab any event and twist it to deceive us in an attempt to have us support the Green cause.
The Readings in this section are indicative examples of this poor behaviour. After reading these, we need to ask “Does the Media check anything they print about global warming?”
Reading 5.3.2 describes the ‘professionals’ in the Bureau of Meteorology and the Media telling us that a storm in Sydney in 2018 was a “Storm in a Century”. Irrationally, this was meant to be “more proof that global warming is real, happening now, and accelerating“. When these claims were investigated, it turned out that the storm was a “Storm in 18 Months – not unusual.
So this ‘Storm in a Teacup” was deliberately misreported by the Bureau of Meteorology’s scientists and the Media. The Media reported this without checking its veracity.
Reading 5.3.3 shows how lazy politicians, the Media and the Green movement can become when they are deceiving us. In their defence, they would probably point out that most citizens can no longer think critically and would believe anything that was told to them without checking.
Repeatedly, the media uses images that has nothing to do with the topic but will help mislead us.
Reading 5.3.4 critiques the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) inability to provide accurate, balanced and unbiased reporting on man-made catastrophic global warming.
Reading 5.3.5 is a critique of a film called “The Age of Consequences” shown on “Four Corners”, an ABC program, which was aired on Monday 20th March 2017. This film, which the ABC asserted was a “documentary”, claimed that man-made catastrophic global warming was a major cause of wars that were happening today.
Reading 5.3.6 critiques the Green movements’ claim in 2015 that a hurricane that made landfall in Mexico was “the worst hurricane in the history of the World”. It then critiques another claim that Australia suffered its worst drought in 10,000 years. This type of alarmist stories is repeated on a regular basis and, of course, these events are always caused by man-made catastrophic global warming.
Reading the first page of “The Swamp” on this website explains there is not enough energy to increase the number or severity of storms. However, the tall tales continue to flow. Our misbehaving Media, more interested in audience and readership numbers, ignore this reality and selfishly report these myths as facts.