Today, Robert Samuelson of Newsweek Magazine
(see right) chastised his own magazine only one week after Newsweek printed a cover story designed to discredit global warming critics. The Samuelson Article, Linked Here, and entitled “Greenhouse Simplicities”, is highly unusual because of the strength of its criticism so soon after the Original article was published. The original article, entitled “The Truth About Denial”, by Sharon Begley, is Linked Here.
An excerpt from the Samuelson article says:
But the overriding reality seems almost un-American: We simply don’t have a solution for this problem. As we debate it, journalists should resist the temptation to portray global warming as a morality tale — as Newsweek did — in which anyone who questions its gravity or proposed solutions may be ridiculed as a fool, a crank or an industry stooge. Dissent is, or should be, the lifeblood of a free society.
I give much credit to Mr. Samuelson. He is right to call Newsweek’s Story a “highly contrived story”. We must continue to have an honest scientific debate about global warming in this country. It is the media’s duty to honestly report scientific facts in a manner which people can fairly understand, and does not cause unfounded alarm.
Tom: You gloss over the fact that Samuelson disagrees with one of your major premises, and of the Global-Warming Denial industry: He claims Global warming is a fact, but is a skeptic about whether we can do anything sufficient to turn things around.
Tom, you are somewhat all over the map, sometimes quoting people who deny that there’s warming, other times quoting people who say there’s warming but aren’t sure of the cause, other times quoting people predicting a cooling trend.
The only thread that runs through all the sources you cite, so inconsistently, is your desire to discredit those who claim global warming is substantially human-caused, and who therefore want to take measures to prevent it.
Samuelson writes that the $10,000 per article claim was “discredited long ago,” but this is simply not the case, and the pseudo-facts he cites (”only $240,000″ and Exxon claims it “knew nothing”) are absolutely meaningless. $240,000 for 24 articles can do a lot in the right publications, and Exxon’s claim could easily be no different from the claims of Tobacco companies that they knew nothing of the effects of smoking (which was a lie).
Dissent may be the lifeblood, but we still, rightly, criticize Holocaust deniers. Samuelson isn’t talking about dissent regarding the fact of GLobal warming. Only what to do about it. And yet he says nothing about Exxon’s great plans. This is probably Samuelson at his worst.
Mr. Neuville has extended his misrepresentation of the scientific facts regarding climate change to media coverage of the same.
Newsweek did not, as Mr. Neuville claims “chastize itself for its global warming article”. Not even close. By printing Samuelson’s op ed piece, they bent over backwards to indulge the wing nuts who desperately grab and distort anything that will help create the illusion of scientific debate.
As Mr. Fried points out in his post, Samuelson’s article does not even TRY to dispute either the scientific consensus regarding climate change, nor the methods and aims of the deniers. Samuelson knows better than to dispute the indisputable.
Instead, Samuelson tells us there is nothing we can do about climate change. This assertion is wrong, defeatist, and is contradicted by the whole of American history that has proven this country up to the challenges confronting it.
Perhaps Senator Neuville will be the standard bearer of this new type of defeatist / deniers: THE CUT AND RUN ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY MAKERS.
Thanks for chiming in, Bob. Tom, your constituents might like to hear your reaction to looking at the corrected list of temperatures and average-mean tempteratures, where the warming trend is evident.
I think another reason for allowing the op-ed by Samuelson has to do with advertising. People have complained about the media being asleep or complicit in our current troubles by not reporting enough hard journalism, and it was surprising and refreshing to see the earlier coverage on corporate-sponsored GW denial get into print. But there’s a pendulum effect, and it’s not unheard-of for advertisers, displeased with editorial decisions, to pull ads if there aren’t concessions made.
I think there are many worried folks in high places these days. If polls had shown similar support for the impeachment of Gore and Clinton, they would never have lasted till the end of their second term. We have Global warming and economic concerns about mitigation (which might make profits for some, mean losses for others, and could require higher taxes on the rich, FDR-style). We have 45% favoring impeachment of Bush, 46% against, the rest undecided, and a 3% margin of error. We have coming oil shortages (there are peak oil deniers too, though) and the inevitability of oil prices spiking in the face of falling supplies and rising demands. Bush and Cheney resisted the 9-11 investigation for 411 days, which was more than any other major investigation–for Pearl Harbor, the Space Shuttle disasters, the JFK assasination, and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandals. Bush-cheney under-funded the investigation, gave it a small time frame within which to complete their work, stacked the deck with the appointment of commissioners, and resisted release of needed documents. When asked to testify, Bush and Cheney exhibited what lawyers would call “guilty demeanor” by requiring that they testify together to keep their story straight, no oath, no recording or transcript, and all notes by note-takers had to be approved by the White House. Almost half of the residents of New York believe Bush knew enough in advance about 9-11 to prevent it, but let it happen so he could have wars that his administration had already planned for in Afghanistan and Iraq, both with oil interests.
Many people who know this are among those who would like impeachment. Many who know about the scientific research, and corporate-funded denial, seek decisive action on global warming.
But decisive action on either or both of these would certainly affect the stock market and the economy. There are people who are working hard to maintain the political-economic-ignorance bubble, and some might claim that there’s a strong argument in favor of ignorance and lies and cover-up if it saves us from economic collapse and from many innocent people suffering because of it.
Samuelson, in his op-ed, is acting like one of the many bubble-blowers, speaking in favor of maintaining the status quo. We’ll see how long it lasts, and how many draconian measures it takes to maintain it (more wars? More tax uts for the rich, higher taxes for the middle class? Mass detention of dissenters, like those conservative John Birch society editors who favor impeachment?).
Shall we wait and see? Like the MN transportation commissioner who decided, against recommendations, that it would be enough to inspect the Mpls. I-35E bridge more often (wait and see) instead of adding metal plates to reinforce where there were cracks appearing?
Maybe that wouldn’t be the best approach?
Tom:
Here are a few clips that state very well the case of bias related to the conservative think-tanks, taken from a July, 2005 piece by Donald Lazere. His topic was academic freedom, but these clips apply also to the discussion of Exxon funding of conservative think-tanks and so-called scientific groups that advance global warming skepticism:
…The conservative foundations and think tanks established in the past 30 years were designed to be, in effect, public relations agencies or lobbies for the Republican Party and the political and economic interests of their corporate sponsors, many of whose executives have also been visibly partisan, influential figures in that party, such as Richard Mellon Scaife (Scaife Foundations), the Coors family (Heritage Foundation), William Simon (Olin Foundation), and William Baroody (American Enterprise Institute). The same cannot be said for more liberally inclined foundations like Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and MacArthur, in relation either to corporate sponsors or the Democratic Party. The very fact that these foundations fund projects that are often antithetical to their corporate patrons’ class interests is evidence that their motives are philanthropic, not propagandistic; they fund precisely the kind of projects least likely to attract corporate sponsorship. This can also be said about George Soros’ politically oriented projects; Soros, perhaps more than any other liberal sponsor, does have Democratic Party ties comparable to those of Scaife and other Republicans — he supports MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress, Emily’s List, Americans Coming Together and several labor unions — but it would be hard to make a case that his philanthropy advances his corporate interests. Much of his and his grantees’ writings warn against capitalists like him gaining too much wealth and power. In contrast, the outcome of the ostensibly objective research conducted by conservative corporate-funded scholars is virtually predetermined to support its sponsors’ financial and ideological interests.
…1. The conservative foundations and think tanks established in the past 30 years were designed to be, in effect, public relations agencies or lobbies for the Republican Party and the political and economic interests of their corporate sponsors, many of whose executives have also been visibly partisan, influential figures in that party, such as Richard Mellon Scaife (Scaife Foundations), the Coors family (Heritage Foundation), William Simon (Olin Foundation), and William Baroody (American Enterprise Institute). The same cannot be said for more liberally inclined foundations like Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and MacArthur, in relation either to corporate sponsors or the Democratic Party. The very fact that these foundations fund projects that are often antithetical to their corporate patrons’ class interests is evidence that their motives are philanthropic, not propagandistic; they fund precisely the kind of projects least likely to attract corporate sponsorship. This can also be said about George Soros’ politically oriented projects; Soros, perhaps more than any other liberal sponsor, does have Democratic Party ties comparable to those of Scaife and other Republicans — he supports MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress, Emily’s List, Americans Coming Together and several labor unions — but it would be hard to make a case that his philanthropy advances his corporate interests. Much of his and his grantees’ writings warn against capitalists like him gaining too much wealth and power. In contrast, the outcome of the ostensibly objective research conducted by conservative corporate-funded scholars is virtually predetermined to support its sponsors’ financial and ideological interests.
Here’s the link to the full article:
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/07/20/lazere
Oops, it seems that instead of pasting two different clips, I pasted the same clip twice. Here’s the other relevant clip I intended to paste into the spot where the copy of the first clip appeared:
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I do not doubt that many scholars who accept money from the conservative foundations maintain intellectual independence and integrity, and are motivated by their own beliefs. It is disingenuous of them, however, to claim they are not compromised by their sponsors’ motives of recruiting the best minds money can buy. These scholars claim that the sponsors do not dictate a line to them, which may be strictly true, but there have been cases of withdrawal of support to grantees who depart too far from the sponsors’ line. Ample evidence of sponsors’ direct control of studies by conservative think tanks and foundations has been provided by apostates from them like Michael Lind and David Brock.
Lind, in Up From Conservatism, writes: “The network orchestrated by the foundations resembled an old-fashioned political patronage machine, or perhaps one of the party writers’ or scholars’ guilds in communist countries. The purpose of intellectuals was to write essays and op-eds attacking liberals and supporting official Republican party positions.” Brock, in Blinded By the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, describes the executives heading the conservative “counter-intelligentsia” as “Leninists of the right,” who exercise control over their subordinates that is “far more rigidly doctrinaire than the PC crowd that had so offended me [as an undergraduate] in Berkeley.”
Brock exposes the pseudo-scholarly trappings of conservative think tanks, mocking his own former title of “John M. Olin Fellow in Congressional Studies” at Heritage. He also recounts how Scaife, the biggest financier of right-wing attacks on Bill Clinton before and throughout his presidency, withdrew funding from Brock (who at that time was the highest paid political journalist in America) and later from The American Spectator when he found their writings about both Bill and Hillary Clinton insufficiently damning.
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The source, again:
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/07/20/lazere