Our democracy depends on how much people have a correct and clear understanding of issues. The media plays a big part in this.
The Australian newspaper since it has been edited by Chris Mitchell has been a key player in the climate debate in Australia.
Robert Manne recently wrote a piece in the Quarterly Essay called [b]”Bad News: Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation.”[/b]
The following are some quotes from it:
…what The Australian has contributed on climate change under Chris Mitchell’s watch is a truly frightful hotchpotch of ideological prejudice and intellectual muddle.
Mitchell inherited a newspaper that had accepted the consensual core of climate science.
Mitchell’s December claim that his paper had provided consistent editorial support for the findings of the climate scientists is simply false.
Throughout the Mitchell years The Australian maintained although not even here consistently rather abstract support for eventual global action on climate change so long as the international price for carbon was modest and the plan was accepted by every major economy in the world.
But it was firmly opposed to practical schemes for global action that currently had international support and any chance of actually reducing emissions.
The Australian was not merely an opponent of Kyoto. Its hostility was ferocious.
Throughout the Mitchell years the paper argued consistently that Australia should primarily look after its own economic interests. It was a tireless defender of the coal industry.
It regarded not only Australia’s future but also the world’s as tied inexorably and rightly to an accelerating consumption of coal for centuries to come.
On one question the editorialists at The Australian were completely consistent – their loathing and contempt for anyone who thought radical action on climate change was needed. Here the paper did not show why the arguments of those calling for radical action were wrong. [The facts] were quite simply never discussed in The Australian’s editorials.
The paper argued that environmentalists who called for radical action to curb greenhouse gases formed what it called “the new frontline for anti-capitalist anti-globalisation campaigners.”
There was a significant problem here. Virtually every climate scientist is convinced that radical action to curb greenhouse gas emissions is vital. At moments in its editorials The Australian half-recognised the impication of what it was saying. On one occasion it wrote disparagingly about “the scientist as savant” and on another about “the shortcomings of relying on experts”. But in general the war on science was probably indadvertent. The Australian’s wild prolonged and abusive attack on the despises “other” it called the “deep greens” of the “true believers” was then not merely an assault on the ideal of civility in debate. It represented a great betrayal of the very values the newspaper imagined it embodied and upheld.
Under mitchell’s editorship The australian’s news items and opinion columns opposed action on climate change by a ratio of about four to one.
In the real world scientists accepting the climate consensus view outnumber denialists by more than 99 to one. In the Alice in Wonderland world of Mitchell’s Australian their contributions were outnumbered 10 to one. The paper published scores of articles by people who claimed to know that the consensual view of the climate scientists was entirely bogus but who have not passed even a first-year university examination in one of the relevant disciplines.
The Australian not only waged war on science but also threatened the always vulnerable place of reason in public life.