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It’s a shame Australia’s billion-dollar-ABC apparently can’t afford a Wall St Journal subscription. In long coverage of the Iranian unrest ABC prime time news tonight said the protesters “wanted the government to create jobs”. (Sounds like an Australian election) But The Wall St Journal, puts it differently. Farnaz Fassihi describes the slogans being chanted:
“We don’t want an Islamic Republic, we don’t want it, we don’t want it.”
“They are using Islam as an excuse to drive people crazy.
Breitbart:
Despite the threats of physical violence, women in the Islamic republic have used the opportunity to call out for more personal freedom and a relaxation of strict Islamic rule and sharia law:
In a different article Caroline Glick sees dismal coverage in the US too and speculates on a much bigger picture.
I’m just letting people know there is another side. Best wishes for the brave people seeking freedom.
There is an epic battle going on, with lives of workers and families at stake, and the only subheader the ABC can find is” ‘Trump should focus on America’.
8.8 out of 10 based on 108 ratings […]
Part #4,566 in The Demonisation of Trump — The Guardian spawns another urban myth and fake-hate-news. Donald Trump accused of obstructing satellite research into climate change
The poor ignorant readers, fed the anti-science spin, and missing all the relevant info below (or any counter point of view) — predictably respond with the words “sociopath”, “Hitler”, “Nazi’s”, “criminals”, “crooks”, “liars” and “sychophants” — and that’s just in the first 20 comments of nearly 400.
The author Robin McKie found one scientist willing to hype this in a suitable way:
“This is like throwing away the medical records of a sick patient,” said David Gallaher of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.
If McKie bothered to get calmer and more accurate views, he does not report them. Though he also says: “Many scientists say this decision was made for purely ideological reasons.” He names none of the “many”. Way to go McKie.
Enter a real expert in satellite systems:
Roy Spencer, award-winning satellite expert, explains how Trump is being wrongly blamed
In short, the story is that a series of US military satellites are monitoring sea ice. Four were launched from 2003 – 2014 (numbered 16 […]
Flinders Island is in the Bass Strait North of Tasmania.
If there is a heaven for renewables, this island should be it. But instead, even on Flinders Island, renewables aren’t cheaper than diesel generators. This is a dismal reality, yet the ABC promotes it as a fantasy poster-isle, interviewing only vested or “no idea” people, asking no critical questions, doing no counter research and telling us renewables will be “more reliable” and implying they are cheaper too. The ABC is a three-million-dollar-a-day advertising outlet for other government agencies. Instead of serving Australians it appears to be there to help shake down the taxpayer.
ABC renewables hype strikes again: Rhiannon Shine reports Flinders Island as a showcase of the brave new renewables world. Let’s translate that spin and see just how pathetic it is. If anywhere was going to be totally renewable, Flinders Island would be it — a first world island, tiny population, massive subsidies, no access to cheap coal or gas power, government support at every level and placed in a handy wind stream known as “the Roaring Forties”. Yeah! This is one of the last places in the first world (short of Antarctic stations) where renewables […]
Christopher Kremmer, Senior Lecturer in Literary & Narrative Journalism, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW, wants to help you shield yourself from worldviews that you don’t like, so he provides a detailed “how to” list of ways to make sure you filter out, specifically, news.com.
This man lectures in journalism. Instead of teaching journalism students on how to logically outplay and counter arguments and spot the flaws, he’s teaching them to cleanse their feeds lest they be exposed to inconvenient worldviews.
The team that has no evidence and no answers has to find a way to compensate for their intellectual vacuum.
Taking control of who gets to send us news
… before I had even typed in my search terms, it was apparent that my options had been narrowed. The news list that the aggregator threw up was dominated by websites whose idea of what constitutes news is very different to my own.
It takes a lot of effort to build an information silo:
One by one, I began blocking offending mastheads, then refreshing the browser to check the progress of my censorship. It takes a while because news websites use multiple addresses to maximise […]
Australia’s “leading climate scientists” can’t predict the climate but they are very good PR operatives. Here in Perth we’ve had a cool year — for the last twelve months it’s been nearly a whole degree cooler than the average for the last 20 years. But last weekend in Perth, news stories told us we’d had an “autumn stinker” and wait for it, we might get Perth’s second hottest first eight days of March. Call that a HFEDOM record and write in the Guinness Book of records. It’s a permutation “record” almost as important as the longest distance run by a man holding a table in his teeth. Except it’s not even a record, it’s a news story about a record that “might happen”, but didn’t.
Let’s name Neil Bennett (BOM) and Will Steffen (ANU) as the Propaganda-in-Chiefs dumping meaningless climate-trivia on the people in order to generate FEAR and screw more money from the public.
Straight from the New Climate PRAVDA Manual:
Invent contrived trivial permutations in order to use the word “record” Don’t bother waiting for real data, use forecasts If record includes the word “cool”, “cooler”, or “cold”, send to trash. When wrong, crickets.
Click to enlarge, […]
More Fake News from the NY Times
Here’s a creative effort to sell the story that the people with billion dollar industries, all the academic positions and a sympathetic media entourage are going underground, forced to disguise their belief about “climate change”.
This is a death-throes type article, clutching for ways to pretend Global Worriers are still relevant, and to feed a fantasy that they might be the underdog.
In America’s Heartland, Discussing Climate Change Without Saying ‘Climate Change’
So while climate change is part of daily conversation, it gets disguised as something else.
“People are all talking about it, without talking about it,” said Miriam Horn, the author of a recent book on conservative Americans and the environment, “Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman.” “It’s become such a charged topic that there’s a navigation people do.”
What really happened is that climate change is overused agitprop and people are tired of being beaten over the head with it. The first most compelling example the NY Times can find is a farmer called Doug Palen who talks about “carbon sequestration” in his soil (and what crop farmer wouldn’t?) Palen is painted as a “believer”:
A week ago, the grip of the old-school media elite was busted, but few seemed to have noticed this remarkable shift.
The top dogs in the media came to him expecting to discuss their access to him, instead he blasted them as deceitful, dishonest liars who should be ashamed.
Over the last forty years the mainstream media have degenerated into naked, unashamed political advocacy, yet conservative leaders still felt they had to pander for fear that they would get an even worse treatment if they called it for what it was. Not Donald Trump. Has there ever been a more powerful US president? They called him every name under the sun, and he took the insults and used them to win.
What other US president didn’t need to pander or even be polite to media royalty? Only a billionaire who got elected despite the old media could afford to blow them away. For the first time in US history, the top gatekeepers of the national discussion were named and shamed… The Kings and Queens of the media finally overplayed their hand to the point where the people elected someone so powerful, so rich, and so independent that he has no […]
Is there anyone online that hasn’t seen angry Democrats rioting, and beating up voters who made the “wrong” choice? In the land of meaningless slogans, this must be what happens when Love Trumps Hate. Presumably they are teaching Hitler’s disciples a lesson. As Mark Steyn says, every Republican candidate is called Hitler, and when everyone’s Hitler, nobody’s Hitler.
Around the world many people remain baffled as to how 60 million US citizens could vote for the sexist, racist, trash talking Trump. In one survey only 4% of Germans said they would vote for him. Here in Australia I don’t know the numbers, but The Flummoxed are everywhere. Thank the media for the one-dimensional caricature they sell.
Things are so bad here that The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) put out a story saying there were “reports from Trump Tower in New York on Tuesday evening” with crowds of thousands chanting: “We hate Muslims, we hate blacks, we want our great country back”. Michael Smith found a tweet pointing out that their entire source for this was a guy who runs a known parody account on Twitter @sRowntreeNews. Smith clocked up the screenshot, sure that the newspaper would correct their inflammatory uber […]
Who are Trump’s loyal army asks Michael Goldfarb of the BBC
America is so divided in 2016 that one half of the electorate can barely understand the other. Comprehending the Donald Trump phenomenon has become the dominant theme of US election coverage…
Dear BBC et al, half the electorate is mocked, reviled, and otherwise ignored. No wonder the other half are clueless… The divided electorates throughout the West don’t understand each other because there is no national conversation to understand. When was the last time the BBC (or ABC) employed a show host that was a skeptic, Brexit-fan, or UKIP voter? Count the years. How about a whole panel? A series? A doco? When was the last government grant awarded to someone to explain the dangers of big-creeping-government?
It’s practically BBC official policy not to even interview people who disagree with certain views, even if that includes 62% of the British public. This is a good way to divide the electorate and create ignorance and misunderstanding, yes? It’s not that the skeptical half can’t get half the evening news, they can’t even get a 10 second, heavily edited sentence in. Greenpeace, on the other hand, get invited to […]
Eggs and Bacon Bay, Tasmania
Their billion-dollar-ABC reports every irrelevant thought bubble a greenie group can dream up:
“PETA launches bid to change Eggs and Bacon Bay to healthy alternative”
The ABC can’t find a single local who wants the change, but they treat the fantasy to a three-photo feature, complete with expert opinions and interviews. The locals think the idea is a bad joke. Listen to Doug:
…Doug said locals were perfectly happy with the name.
“These single-interest groups ought to go overseas and annoy the shit out of ISIS,” he said.
The only person outside the ABC who thinks this issue is worth discussing is some poor chicken mayor who is happy to sell out the locals for fear of offending the busybody control-freaks:
Huon Valley Mayor Peter Coad is willing to consider the idea.
“Obviously these issues should be taken seriously and have some merit,” he said.
Dear Mayor Coad, PETA are demanding a meat-free map. You think this is serious?
One type of Eggs And Bacon Flower.
The town, by the way, is named after a flower. That’ll be next on the hit list, and before […]
…
Malcolm Roberts
Some in the love media have real trouble understanding preferential voting. Big numbers seem to confuse them.
There are headlines that Malcolm Roberts “only got 77 votes” as if to delegitamize the skeptic. The Courier Mail put it on the front page. What they couldn’t find was one voter who voted for Pauline Hanson who was unhappy about where their vote went. And there were plenty to ask: Hanson’s party got 593,000 first preference votes nationally and won four Senate seats.
Apparently to be considered a real senator the magic number of first preference votes this year is “100″.
In South Australia, Stirling Griff of the Nick Xenophon Team won “103″ votes, and Sky Kakosche-Moore won “129″. Alex Gallacher, Australian Labor Party, won with “330 votes”. No newspapers seem to be suggesting that they don’t deserve to be there, or that their success is a reason to axe preferential voting.
In WA, the Liberal Party won fully 3 of their 5 Senate seats on a average of just 600 “votes” each. Let’s ignore that the Liberal group ticket in WA had 510,000 votes. They ended up getting five senators elected with less votes than […]
The good news is that a majority of people are aware of media bias, and are skeptical of what the media tells them. The bad news is that this is just another marker showing the average Western citizen is losing faith in the integrity of so many key institutions.
The activist journo’s have overplayed their hand. They are not even trying…
“Voters Expect Reporters To Help Clinton Over Trump”
[July 21st, 2016] A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that only 20% of Likely U.S. Voters think that when covering a political campaign, most reporters try to offer unbiased coverage. Most (69%) say reporters try to help the candidate they want to win. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure (To see survey question wording, click here.)
The media have lost so much influence. They described Brexiteers as loony, selfish and xenophobic, but more than half the country ignored them and voted for Brexit. Similarly, the US media mocked and denigrated Trump supporters, and continually predicted he wouldn’t stay in the race, and wouldn’t make it through the primaries, and yet he did. Poor pundits keep being surprised by the people.
The key word in this […]
It’s panic stations over at Believer Central. They are losing their grip on the media. And 2015 was a bumper year for Climate Scares – the hottest ever year, the giant Paris Junket, The El Nino, The Pope! (The Pope?) Despite all that, the media spent less time on the climate. It doesn’t get any better than 2015 for the Global Worriers — there is no higher level of panic. But the free propaganda machine is slowing…
Lookout, climate denial is on the rise (don’t ask about the error bars):
…
Dana Nuccitelli, The Guardian
During the most important year for climate news, TV coverage fell
A report by Media Matters for America reveals that the media are failing to inform the American public on the most important issue of our time.
Media Matters for America has published a report detailing US broadcast news coverage of climate change in 2015, and their findings are stunning.
Stunning eh? Or not.
Dana might be knocked over, but I see ABC down 20, Fox up 20, and some “other stuff”. It’s not really much of a trend. The thing that really bugs Dana seems to […]
UPDATE: For those who can’t see the ABC footage we have a copy at dropbox, thanks to Panda.
UPDATE #2: This episode has now been pulled from the ABC website 13 days early. The ABC, with its billion dollar budget, has a website to show all its programs for 14 days after they run. But for no stated reason this one has been deleted after just one day. Did the ABC not like us discussing it? (H/t to Panda). Thank goodness we have a copy. [Screencap of current ABC page here.]
h/t to Peter Q. Thanks to Andrew M as well.
Dennis Jensen has a lot to say on matters of national importance, but the ABC doesn’t ask him very often about those.
Tonight Dr Dennis Jensen was just the “Climate denier” target who had stepped over the line on another topic — breaking a sacred taboo. He might lose pre-selection. He might be out of a job. The ABC seem to think we care about the party political machinations more than the suffering of Australian citizens, which Jensen had been trying to get us to discuss. Instead the ABC went into great details of […]
The media hype and the story of the false Penguin Panic
Image: UNSW/Chris Turney
Much fuss was made of 150,000 missing penguins in Antarctica as if climate change had killed them. A monster iceberg had washed in, stopping the cute swimming tuxedos from getting to dinner and the colony of 160,000 suddenly shrank to 10,000. Where did all those penguins go? In previous tough times, when they could be tracked they just split up and went to different colonies.
Given that the penguins have survived repeated ice ages and warming for millions of years who would have thought that they would have a strategy for dealing with the odd big iceberg?
The penguin catastrophe:
[Grist] Researchers found that a colony of Adélie penguins in Antartica’s Cape Denison has decreased from 160,000 to just 10,000 since 2011, when a huge iceberg ominously named B09B became grounded in nearby Commonwealth Bay. The penguins were once a short waddle from their food source, but the arrival of the iceberg — which is nearly the size of Rhode Island — has turned that jaunt into a 75-mile round trip. Talk about a long lunch.
Cry for those penguins:
“It’s […]
It’s taken five years to figure it out, but apparently climate change is even worse than the last time we thought it was worse. Who knew? Once upon a time, glaciers were at a constant perfect position. Life was paradise on Earth and all the animals were happy. But then mankind built that first planet-destroying coal powered station in 1880 and now mountains are being moved, the Earth is changing.
Or at least, that’s sort of what the press release implies. What this tale is really about is the way the media hyperbole is just another excuse to repeat The Climate Mantra even if has nothing much to do with what the paper. What were those observations again?
If Nature, the formerly esteemed journal, was half what it used to be, it would have helped young Michele Koppes keep a longer term perspective, and not lace the press release with baseless speculation. Probably she’s seen a few too many Greenpeace-BBC specials and thinks Antarctica is warming (when the satellites show it isn’t). And curiously, the part that is warming happens to be right over the edges of the tectonic plates where the volcanoes are. She might think climate models work […]
Imagine the crime of trying to audit the BOM?
Last year, Graham Lloyd wrote in The Australian about how the BOM had made whopping two degree adjustments to data which turned cooling trends to warming trends and instead of improving the data, it created discontinuities. The BOM’s eventual explanation lamely exclaimed that the stations “might” have moved. (And they might not, too. Who knows, but remember this is what 95% certainty looks like.) Lloyd wrote about how historical records of extreme heat at Bourke had effectively been thrown in the trash. Who cares about historical records?
In response to the embarrassment and revealing questions, Tony Abbott wanted an investigation. But Greg Hunt, and The Dept of Environment opposed the investigation and opposed doing “due diligence”. What are they afraid of? Instead, Hunt helped the BOM set up a one-day-wonder investigation with hand-picked statisticians that wasted another nine months before admitting that the BOM methods would never be publicly available or able to be replicated. If it can’t be replicated, it isn’t science.
The BOM’s defense is always that their mystery method is considered “best practice” by other agencies around the world — who share the same incentives to exaggerate warming, […]
What to do with the public broadcasters? ABC BBC CBC (Can anyone explain public media in NZ?)
Big-government fans forcibly take funds from all citizens to support big-government propaganda by journalists who predominantly vote left or very-left (see here or here). The question is not whether or not they should do this but whether to privatize the public broadcasters, or to split them in two. I say, let’s forget the submissive plea to get one conservative commentator among a monoculture of “progressives”. Chop the current one in half and call it what it is: pro big-government. Then set up a new counter half to match — the pro-small-government broadcaster with the same funds but new staff. (Game on — let the best team win that ratings war.) Abbott could keep ABC funding promises. ABC-L plus ABC-R equals current ABC-LL+ funding.
Obviously, true free-market libertarians want public broadcasters 100% sold — their incentives are always going to run counter to unbiased reporting and the hunt for the truth. On the other hand, among the populace, the ground is not remotely laid for a big-sell. Many voters remain blind to the bias, and have no idea how filtered the half-truths are: […]
In years to come when people wonder how so much money came to be wasted in a frivolous attempt to stop the storms, people will marvel at the failure of parts of the free press. The Guardian will rise above that pack, standing out as the one that dressed itself in the color of gullible.
There are more than 31,000 whistleblowers inside science, 9,000 with PhD’s, 2 with Nobel Physics prizes, and 3 men who walked on the moon. There are meteorologists who won prizes in Meteorology, and physicists who studied with the greats — and they’re warning that the science is not settled, but the journalists at The Guardian know better.
Instead of asking hard questions of both skeptics and believers, the writers saw the passion and energy of namecalling activists and were swept off their feet to join the march. Now they dish out their infinite wisdom on science, on national policy and finance. If only the rest of us could be as genius and kind as Alan Rusbridger, eh?
But what are the Guardian guarding these days? They want to silence skeptics, and push a committee consensus. It isn’t free speech, and it isn’t science. If there […]
The wall of money is enormous, and the media oblivious to the real flow from taxpayers to corporate welfare freeloaders.
The wall of money, part 23
Citigroup promised to spend, invest and loan $50 billion in 2007 and found it so easy, it managed to do it by 2013, three years ahead of schedule. This month it promised to send another $100 billion more towards “sustainability”.
How much of this is about being a green corporate citizen? Not much apparently. Citigroup are making the Citigroup buildings energy efficient, but what they didn’t say was whether they would stop investing in or taking money and profits from their fossil fuel customers. As it happens Citigroup might Big-Green, but they are also Big-Ungreen too, they were one of “the top providers of funding for the most damaging practices of the U.S. coal industry last year. “ Not that any journalist mentioned that when they repeated the press release.
The banks can sniff out a good subsidy — it’s money for jam, and they are happy to feed the machine that feeds them.
Easy money for “sustainability” will also generate thousands of scary press releases from each and every sub-project as they […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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