Month: November 2012

Journalistic failures on climate crisis

Journalist turned climate activist Wen Stephenson has a must-read piece in The Phoenix on the urgency of talking about climate change and the total failures of the mainstream press to address it as a crisis. Of note:

First: We need to see a much greater sense of urgency in the media’s coverage of climate change, including in the Globe‘s editorial and opinion pages. This is more than an environmental crisis: it’s an existential threat, and it should be treated like one, without fear of sounding alarmist, rather than covered as just another special interest, something only environmentalists care about. And it should be treated as a central issue in this election, regardless of whether the candidates or the political media are talking about it.

Second: Business-as-usual, politics-as-usual, and journalism-as-usual are failing us when it comes to addressing the climate threat. If there’s to be any hope for the kind of bold action we need, a great deal of pressure must be brought from outside the system, in the form of a broad-based grassroots movement, in order to break the stranglehold of the big-money fossil fuel lobby on our politics. And in fact, there is a movement emerging on campuses and in communities across the country — especially here in New England — and the Globe should be paying attention to it.

And:

In the face of this situation — as much as it pains me to say this — you are failing. Your so-called “objectivity,” your bloodless impartiality, are nothing but a convenient excuse for what amounts to an inexcusable failure to tell the most urgent truth we’ve ever faced.

Let me be clear: the problem isn’t simply a matter of “false balance” — for most of you, that debate is largely over, and you no longer balance the overwhelming scientific consensus with the views of fossil-fuel lobby hacks. No, what I’m talking about is your failure to cover the climate crisis as a crisis — one in which countless millions, even billions, of lives are at stake.

And:

What it all comes down to, then, is this: Which side are you on?

If you’re on the side of your fellow human beings — and of your own children and grandchildren — then it’s time for you to level with the public about the severity, scale, and urgency of the crisis we face.

On polling & punditry

This piece at the sports blog Deadspin by David Roher on the spurious attacks on poll analyst Nate Silver from the right, as well as from established Beltway pundits like David Brooks and Joe Scarborough, is must-read.

In particular:

In fact, we’ve reached the point in our screwed-up political media culture where the polling companies and forecasters—not the pundits, not the spokespeople, and certainly not the candidates—are the only people being evaluated rigorously on the substance of their arguments. If Nate Silver and Sam Wang screw up, their popularity will suffer as a result, and they’ll have to reconsider their models. Meanwhile, if Brooks, Jordan, Scarborough, Rubin, or Byers make another poor argument, they’ll continue to collect their paychecks as if nothing had happened. Likewise, the Curse of the Bambino stopped working long ago, and yet Dan Shaughnessy is still getting book deals.

Just like their colleagues in the sports section, the political pundits see the wrong kind of uncertainty in Nate Silver. They associate statistics with mathematical proof, as if a confidence interval were the same thing as the Pythagorean Theorem. Silver isn’t more sure of himself than his detractors, but he’s more rigorous about demonstrating his uncertainty. He’s bad news for the worst members of the punditry, who obscure the truth so their own ignorance looks better by comparison and who make their money on the margin of uncertainty, too.

Charles Pierce on his vote

I’ve found the ouvre of bloggers writing about why progressives should vote for Obama to be generally dismissive and unserious, at least in so far as they are in response to much more principled, thorough and thoughtfully honest pieces about why certain people have decided not to vote for Obama. The amount of venom and bile spewed at people like Matt Stoller, Conor Friedersdorf, or Glenn Greenwald is truly startling. In contrast to that, Charles Pierce has a pretty piece on why he’s voting for President Obama, despite generally being a supporter of Green Party candidate Jill Stein. He strongly disagrees with arguments by Stein, Stoller & Friedersdorf against Obama, though he is better than most in terms of not coming across like a complete donkey in so doing. It’s worth a read.