Bookmarks
Key
Download PDF

Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

2. Complete Transcript and Rebuttal

[Narrator]

In fact the theory of man-made global warming has spawned an entirely new branch of journalism.

[Nigel Calder]

You’ve got a whole new generation of reporters: environmental journalists; and if you’re an environmental journalist and if the global warming story goes in the trash can, so does your job. It really is that crude. And the reporting has to get more and more hysterical because there are still fortunately a few hardened news editors around, who will say: “you know, this is what you were saying five years ago”. “Ah, but now it’s much, much worse – you know, there’s going to be ten feet of sea-level rise by next Tuesday,” or something. They have to keep on getting shriller and shriller and shriller.

[Comment 97: The first statement by Calder is factually incorrect. The second is either an ignorant or a wilfully misleading account of environmental change stories in the contemporary British media. All major quality newspapers have had Environment Correspondents since the late 1980s. The size of the environmental press corps has grown and fallen with public attention, but this has been a stable area of reporting regardless of the fortunes of the climate change story (see Brown and McDonald in Smith 2000, http://tinyurl.com/2jt529). None of these specialist journalists started on the environment beat. All have come from other areas of journalism and general training.

The comment suggests self-interestedness by reporters. This fails to recognise both the high levels of mobility within the profession between specialisms and institutions, and also the sense in which the climate change issue has for at least two years widened out beyond specialist coverage, to be explored critically by economics, business, personal finance and a host of other specialists as well as leader writers and columnists.]

(In breach of the 2003 Communications Act Section 265, Ofcom 5.4, 5.5, 5.7, 5.11, 5.12)

2.10 “The Ice is Not Melting”

[Narrator]

It is now common in the media to lay the blame for every storm or hurricane on global warming. But is there any scientific basis for this?

[Comment 98: Some elements of the press might do that sometimes (although even then, the above statement is gross exaggeration); but climate scientists certainly do not – e.g. see Realclimate: http://tinyurl.com/dptpu.]

(In breach of the 2003 Communications Act Section 265, Ofcom 5.4, 5.5, 5.7, 5.11, 5.12)

[Bookmarks on this page: Click any of the following links to go to that bookmark. You can then copy and paste the bookmark’s url from your address bar, and send it to someone as a link straight to that bookmark:
Comment 97: Misrepresentation of how specialist journalism works / Section 2.10 / Comment 98: Sensationalism of media sensationalism]


Page 81 of 176	Final Revision	Last updated: 11 Jun 2007