MarketWatch’s Jon Friedman pens a truly incoherent and dunderheaded attack on environmental journalists. Look at this mess, taken from the middle of the piece:

Beyond sticking to a few catch-phrases and earnestly spouting a do-good philosophy gleaned from Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the media aren’t doing much to try to explain the green phenomenon.

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“I think most journalists get hung up on the jargon,” [MarketWatch columnist and green author Thomas] Kostigen said. “They talk about global warming and carbon emissions as opposed to climate change and pollution. In other words, they get lost in the abstract and the science.”

I asked Kostigen if the media’s ignorance was based on a failure to grasp the facts or a political bias.

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In three paragraphs, environmental journalists spout do-good philosophy, use too many technical and scientific terms, and are ignorant. Don’t you have to know something about the subject matter to use technical terms? And how are they both not doing much to explain the green phenomenon and getting too deep into the science? How can Friedman be such a tool while lecturing other journalists?

Curtis Brainard ponders these matters at length in Columbia Journalism Review.

 

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