Is News Corp. Failing Science?
Permanent Link:

Material Information

Title:
Is News Corp. Failing Science?
Creator:
Aaron Huertas
Dena Adler
Publisher:
Union of Concerned Scientists
Publication Date:
Language:
English

Notes

Content Advice:
News Corporation is one of the world’s largest media companies. Under its Global Energy Initiative, the company has publicly committed to engaging its audiences on sustainability issues and the company publicly touts climate change initiatives among its successes. Despite News Corp.’s public commitment to environmental sustainability, a snapshot analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) finds that recent portrayals of climate science on Fox News Channel and in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section are overwhelmingly misleading. UCS’s analysis finds that: • Over a recent six-month period, 93 percent of Fox News Channel’s representations of climate science were misleading (37 out of 40 instances). • Similarly, over the past year, 81 percent of the representations of climate science in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section were misleading (39 out of 48 instances). UCS’s examination finds that the misleading citations include broad dismissals of human-caused climate change, disparaging comments about individual scientists, rejections of climate science as a body of knowledge, and cherry picking of data. Fox News Channel citations also included several discussions in which misleading claims dominated accurate ones. Furthermore, much of this coverage denigrated climate science by either promoting distrust in scientists and scientific institutions or placing acceptance of climate change in an ideological, rather than fact-based, context. In 2007, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch claimed coverage of climate change in his media outlets would improve over time. Based on this 2012 snapshot analysis, such improvement has not been achieved. UCS calls upon News Corp. to undertake a thorough examination of how its media outlets portray climate science and to develop standards and practices for communicating the subject to its audiences. Equally important, News Corp. needs to help its staff to differentiate between ideological beliefs and scientific facts—that is, between the ideological preferences regarding the response (personal or governmental) to climate change and the overwhelming body of established scientific evidence that human-caused climate change is occurring.

Record Information

Source Institution:
Florida International University
Rights Management:
Please contact the owning institution for licensing and permissions. It is the user's responsibility to ensure use does not violate any third party rights.

dpSobek Membership

Aggregations:
Sea Level Rise