Photo by Ario.
Brace yourself for some shocking news: A new study on Friday found that the two major publications of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation greatly mislead their audiences about climate change. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) combed six months of Fox News broadcasting and a year’s worth of Wall Street Journal editorial pages for mentions of the science of “climate change” and “global warming,” then compared each claim to “mainstream scientific understanding” of the topic at hand. Here’s what they found:
Data from UCS.
“Everywhere I go, what I hear quoted back to me as scientific fact is often wrong,” said Brenda Ekwurzel, a UCS staff scientist who presented the study to an audience gathered to discuss the state of climate communication with TIME environment editor Bryan Walsh and Harvard oceanographer James McCarthy. “That, to me, is so discouraging.”
What’s especially creepy about the study is how low the bar is for what constitutes “accurate.” From the study:
Citations deemed to be misleading questioned either the reality of climate change or the fact that recent climate change is largely due human activities, or they advanced other arguments that dismissed established climate science.
In other words, this is quantitative proof that the climate change debate in America is still mired in bickering over whether the problem even exists or not. Here’s the breakdown on the shapes misleading statements took between the two outlets, which together reach an audience of nearly 4 million:
After releasing the study, Ekwurzel led a group from the New York Public Library science branch to Bryant Park, to stage a mark-up of all the errors in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, which was roundly rebuffed by the very scientists it quoted. News Corporation has a history of blantantly misrepresenting science, of course. But since, as McCarthy reminded the crowd, “most of the public doesn’t have the opportunity to have a conversation with a scientist on climate change,” findings like these go a long way toward explaining why many elected officials are completely intransigent on climate action.
This story was produced by Mother Jones as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
