We’ve written a lot about free speech: from organized denial using free speech as a front for disinformation, to a columnist’s right to be a bullshitter, to corporate donations as free speech, to the Koch’s campus crusades.
But an open letter from 60 British climate experts that ran in the Guardian Sunday gets right to the heart of the climate denial-free speech issue. They formally announce what has pretty much already been accepted in the US: debating deniers is a false equivalence that does the public a disservice.
Deniers, of course, chose to tell the world. Human pustule James Delingpole, who admitted back in 2011 that he’s just “an interpreter of interpretations” that doesn’t consider it his job to read peer-reviewed papers, ironically chose to go after the credentials of some of the signers in his piece for the Breitbart. At the National Review, Wesley Smith claims that only presenting “alarmists’ side of the case… will not change minds” and will actually cause more skepticism. Though that’s obviously dumb, Smith does probably knows about causing unwarranted skepticism in legitimate science, considering he works for the creationist Discovery Institute.
Then there’s Koch boy Michael Bastasch at the Daily Caller, who mostly just copies and pastes from the letter for his piece, but also provides a few examples of people refusing to debate deniers. One faux-outrage piece wasn’t clickbait enough though, apparently, so Bastasch wrote a second story about the censorship of skeptics to keep them out of the mainstream media.
In their letter, the British experts offer up flat earth conspiracies and the smoking-cancer link as two examples of when the media doesn’t include lobbyists or contrarians in the discussion, for good reason. But there’s an even better example of the danger of media broadcasting all claims as though they’re equal and letting the public decide which argument is true: Vaccines.
The anti-vaccine argument, of course, stemmed largely from the debunked and withdrawn work of the discredited Andrew Wakefield. But where he failed in the scientific literature, and was even stripped of his license to practice medicine, Wakefield excelled at playing the media (just like deniers.) Thanks to the same spirit of “let’s have a debate, people are smart enough to figure out which argument is true” that climate deniers are invoking, media facilitated the spread of this dangerous message that has led to serious consequences.
We can now see the danger of the media enabling false arguments for sake of free speech: there were 41,000 cases of measles in Europe during the first six months of 2018, compared to just 5,273 over the same period in 2016. In the US, vaccine refusals are up, creating fertile ground for diseases that we have no reason to let infect our children.
Measles was effectively eradicated in the US by 2000, but largely thanks to anti-vaxxers, has made something of a comeback, particularly in Minnesota, for example, where anti-vaxxer propaganda targeted Somali-American immigrants. And then there’s the effect that these conspiracies have on reporters, who may shy away from covering real potential problems with vaccines for fear of igniting anti-vaxxer sentiments and feeding those paranoid delusions.
There is a clear danger in allowing anti-vaxxers to inject their conspiracy theories into the public discourse through the media’s rebroadcasting of their ludicrous claims.
That’s probably one of the reasons why Russian bots have been pushing anti-vaxx messages: there could be no greater propaganda success than convincing your enemy to let their children die from easily preventable diseases.
Except, perhaps, convincing your enemy to entertain a debate about whether or not we should stop burning the fossil fuels that are leading to conditions that will benefit your frozen landscape while causing billions of Earth’s other inhabitants to suffer.
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