Yesterday, Media Matters reported on a survey from the Society of Environmental Journalists on local climate reporting. While some of the survey’s findings were encouraging, others confirmed some disappointing trends. Six in 10 reporters felt like downsizing hurt climate coverage, two-thirds said they didn’t have the time to do as much field reporting as they’d like, and one in five said they’d had a climate story “softened or censored.”
On the other hand, environmental reporters themselves are pretty well-educated at this point. Only one in 10 still regularly cite deniers for “balance”, two thirds are aware of the 97% consensus, nearly all the survey participants know that warming is happening and caused by human activity, and 96% claim to have personally experienced the effects of warming.
While real journalists are striving to cover the reality of climate change, our friends in the deniersphere struggle with reality. For example, Koch-operative-pretending-to-be-a-reporter Michael Bastasch “reported” in The Daily Caller Thursday that MSNBC’s Chuck Todd “admitted” there’s an “‘institutional bias’ in the media against Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Scott Pruitt.”
Unfortunately for Bastasch, the transcript of the interview Todd gave with Hugh Hewitt clearly shows that Todd didn’t admit there’s a bias against Pruitt at all. Rather, he says that there’s a bias “towards climate science… that is perceived as an ideological bias...when it comes to some of these science studies and things like that on the climate.” This preference for science and studies “automatically puts [Pruitt] sort of on the defensive.”
In other words, the media is pro-science and reality and Pruitt is an anti-science climate change denier, and some people perceive that as bias. Not exactly the story Bastasch is trying to sell.
Similarly, Breitbart’s top story yesterday was a report from “The Western Journal” about how Facebook’s new algorithm changes hurts conservative news media and helped liberal outlets. The Western Journal (nee Western Journalism) is, according to The Intercept, run by Floyd Brown, a Republican consultant and Trump advisor responsible for the racist “Willie Horton” ads.
It’s not totally surprising that Breitbart is using this particular outlet as a source for claims about media bias is not surprising but definitely amusing. More importantly, much like how the Daily Caller complained about Google’s fact check targeting conservative sites, what this shows is that conservative outlets are less reliable than mainstream and liberal ones. As we’ve discussed before in reference to fake news, conservatives do it most.
Per a quote from Facebook featured in the Western Journal story, the social media site’s latest algorithm change is a reflection of its newfound posture of “leaning into quality news” and “try to to define what ‘quality news’ looks like and give that a boost.” Breitbart and Western Journal are being punished not because they’re conservative, but because they are simply not quality news.
Facebook’s bias, then, is similar to the bias described by Chuck Todd: towards reality. And reality, as a very wise man once said, has a well-known liberal bias.
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