Professor Of Journalism Says Journalists Shouldn’t Be Neutral When It Comes To Climate Doom

In case assistant professor Perry Parks of Michigan State missed it, most journalists who write about the climate scam are completely biased, as they are on most issues

Why journalists shouldn’t be neutral on climate change

The immediacy and the stakes of human-driven climate change have never been clearer. Yet journalists reporting on climate-driven disasters are still pulling punches in their coverage. They often don’t explicitly invoke climate change in their reporting and even more rarely do they identify the primary culprit behind it: the human consumption of fossil fuels, egged on by oil and gas companies that have long known better.

Journalists cherish their performance of neutrality when reporting on controversial issues. But this commitment to appearing “balanced” — even when one side relies on evidence and the other is making things up — has come at a profound cost. It’s led major news outlets to cover what should be the science story of our time through the lens of politics, resulting in a delayed, diminutive planetary response to the once slowly, and now rapidly, accelerating climate emergency.

Journalistic neutrality posits that it’s possible to approach a news story without filtering choices through some system of values: about what’s right and wrong, true and false, important and trivial, “normal” and deviant. But this long-held reporting norm is a fallacy. Contemporary media critics such as Jay Rosen and Lewis Raven Wallace have aptly argued that all communication originates in “a view from somewhere”: We are inevitably influenced by our experiences, our families, our peers and our moral commitments, and it’s more productive to recognize and acknowledge these commitments than to delude ourselves or (as journalists often do) overrepresent views we find harmful just to demonstrate impartiality.

This is what students are treated to in journalism school. They are taught to be biased. Impartial. Advocates. Activists. Hence why we see what we see in the news. How few treat the climate crisis (scam) as something to question.

There’s only one way for journalists to minimize harm around climate change — and that’s to fight it.

They are no longer journalists at that point. But, then, most journalists/reporters has stopped being such decades ago.

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8 Responses to “Professor Of Journalism Says Journalists Shouldn’t Be Neutral When It Comes To Climate Doom”

  1. Professor Hale says:

    Nothing new. Modern “Journalists” see themselves as a part of the story. The only thing they learned in “journalism” school is to make up 500 words every week and turn it in on time for a grade. Writing about Climate change is easy because someone else already wrote the same thing. They just need to reword it and call it their own. No research, creativity or writing skills required. Just reprint what someone else wrote. Just like in “Journalism school” but they don’t even have to pretend it is their own work.

  2. Elwood P. Dowd says:

    Journalists should give equal time to liars? Flat-earthers? Anti-vaxxers?

    Cynics and nihilists comprise the nuCon (MAGA) movement. Believe no one. Trust no one. Everyone has an “angle”.

    • Jl says:

      Yes, they should, especially because there’s no evidence of any “doom”. That was so hard to figure out..

  3. drowningpuppies says:

    Andrew Breitbart said at a speech in Nashville over a decade ago that the establishment media has “disdain” for the American people…the implication being that media elites feel they know what’s better for us. Now throw in the tech overlords controlling access to information and that disdain is magnified exponentially. They all know the best version of America for all of us.

    Well, guess what? Donald Trump and Elon Musk say fuck you!

    https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/08/13/kahn-donald-trump-and-elon-musks-fck-you-to-save-america/
    https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_bye.gif

  4. JimS says:

    As an alumnus of Michigan State, I am embarrassed for my Alma Mater. Yet another reason they get no money from me.

    • Professor Hale says:

      They already got your money.

      • JimS says:

        True, but that was back in the 79s when things were saner. Also, since I was in engineering, I avoided most of the crap that would become wokeism. 🙂

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