I'll ask because Laurie David wrote an excellent piece for them today on the Media's moral need to cover global warming science accurately.

I liked it because she picked up on a few critical aspects of denialist attacks on science.

If you saw the interview, you know that instead of focusing on the serious problems of global warming and what we need to do about it, Joe decided to put on the hat of naysayer to attempt to refute the consensus opinion of over 2000 scientists from over 150 countries including the US.

He chose to refer to a recent 'documentary' out of Britain that attempts to refute the scientific consensus around global warming.

...

A quick survey of film's 'expert' contributors uncovers a virtual who's who of Exxon funded global warming deniers. Further, I uncovered numerous allegations of selective editing of interviews (apparently causing at least one scientist to threaten legal action), the use of mislabeled graphs, outdated and flawed data, not to mention that the list of 'experts' interviewed includes a who's who of Exxon's favorites. Worse is that when the film's creator was alerted to the fact that the data he was using in certain cases was outdated, misrepresented and flawed, he intentionally ignored it.

Then she ends with an appeal to the media to not dismiss scientific consensus so easily.

What steams me the most about this incident is that for years the media was legitimately misled by industry funded deniers and junk science, however, we are well past the point in time where anyone in the media can credibly say that the earth is not warming and that we are not to blame.

There comes a time when the media has a moral responsibility to accept the prevailing scientific consensus and leave behind the illogical need to create controversy where it does not exist. If they choose not to then that is their mistake, their shame, and their responsibility. What Joe Kernen did was not fair reporting. It was editorializing. On that note, the better word to describe Joe Kernen's actions is "irresponsible". I hope he looks it up.

Now, that's interesting to me. Because I regard HuffPo as a denialist site. Why? Because they promote the mercury/autism ramblings of David Kirby and Robert Kennedy Jr.'s sad conspiracy mongering about the CDC.

It's really very sad. Kirby is a lost-cause believer in altie-woo, but Kennedy in particular is dead-on about other scientific issues, why can't he see that his conspiracy mongering over thimerosal, long discredited as a cause of autism, is a sign of poor scientific reasoning?

And what about HuffPo's responsibility to not promote quackery for treating autism and lies about vaccines? For instance this post today in which she promotes experimentation on children with the unproven "DAN" protocol - based on mercury "detoxification". No credible expert on autism believes in mercury as a cause of, or chelation as a cure for, autism.

How about HuffPo exercise some media responsibility of it's own and stop promoting quackery and lies about vaccines?

Labels: anti-Vax denialism, Huffington Post