When a referee calls a personal foul, do you respect it and clean up your act, or do you double down and attack the ref? Obviously there are bad calls made occasionally, but if every time a call is made against you, you take the refs from the basketball court to a courtroom crying defamation, you’re clearly not confident in your on-court ability. And then, after you've lost both in and on the court, your next move is to get together a bunch of other frequently-flagged losers to complain about officials being mean, it’s obvious you’re just trying to work the refs.
Excuse the long-winded metaphor, but it’s a perfect way to think about a new YouTube video from John Stossel attacking fact checkers as “fact blockers.” A couple months ago, Stossel announced that he’s suing Facebook for defamation, on the basis of multiple fact checks against his content that may or may not be produced thanks to the million-plus dollars he’s received from the Koch fortune. (He’s hiring a new full-time video producer, by the way, so that Facebook ad revenue dip he’s suing over clearly hasn’t slowed him down that much!)
This latest video-turned-column builds on that grievance, by bringing in other obvious bad faith actors, with little scientific training who have been repeatedly debunked by legitimate and credible scientists, to smear the fact checkers.
As one of the Koch’s highest-paid contractors in recent years, it’s perhaps no surprise that Stossel’s complaints appeared at professional and/or Koch-funded climate denial hubs like Heartland, and the Daily Signal, TownHall and elsewhere, despite being a difficult-to-read semi-transcript of his video.
If Stossel were looking to shore up the credibility of his fellow fact-checked martyrs, he likely couldn’t have chosen worse examples than the three he did: Michael Shellenberger, Bjorn Lomborg, and John Tierney.
First up is John Tierney, who wrote something about masks and children that Science Feedback fact checked and found wanting. Tierney is a former New York Times columnist who Joe Romm described as “the country’s worst science writer” due to his deliberate contrarianism. In more recent years, Tierney has only grown dumber, for example describing disgraced Trump EPA administrator Scott Pruitt as a “warrior for science”, despite his very deliberate “war on air pollution science.”
Just to give you an idea of how small and stale this talent pool really is: Teirney also believed then-president-elect Trump would handle science issues better than Obama, and while he didn’t speculate on how a Trump administration might handle a global pandemic, he did compare Trump’s perspective to that of Bjorn Lomborg’s “Copenhagen Consensus, a group of prominent economists who have concluded that other problems are far more pressing than climate change.” (Of course, Lomborg’s project was hardly as prominent as he claimed, given that the “seven Nobel laureates” he once claimed were part of his consensus in 2015 included someone who had died years before.) And this was not Teirney’s first brush with Bjorn, as he had cited Lomborg back in 2007, and got (accurate) criticism for it.
Next up was Michael Shellenberger, introduced with an old Colbert Show clip Stossel used to suggest Shellenberger is somehow credible or particularly relevant. Supposedly he was fact checked for contesting that we’re in a sixth major extinction event, but the actual content was much more detailed than that. Surprise surprise: people who are dishonest are also dishonest about work proving their dishonesty!
Stossel then goes to Bjorn Lomborg, whose false claims about warming saving lives are still unsupported by the study Lomborg cites, according to the actual study’s co-author.
As Teirney’s old citation of Lomborg and Shellenberger on Colbert illustrate, these guys have been doing this same exact shtick for quite a while now. They’ve had plenty of time to make their argument to the public. They’ve largely failed, and now, finally, they’re facing actual noticeable repercussions to their career of disinformation in the form of (mildly) reduced virality on Facebook.
Unfortunately, that limited effect is rendered pointless when they can just go to Twitter to share their misleading YouTube video about how fact checkers have silenced their Facebook page, (that still gets thousands of interactions on posts), and then take to one of the Rupert Murdoch-owned media outlets to further spread their disinformation to millions more.
It’s understandable, though, that Stossel et al. would pour so much time and energy into attacking the fact checkers. Afterall, their careers are built on spreading disinformation to cover for polluters and prevent meaningful climate action that reduces fossil fuel use.
