NATURE’S PRINCIPAL PUBLIC REPRESENTATIVE: THE MASS MEDIA - Making Sense of Nature - page 241

that of a stenographer, engaged in a nominally balanced 'he said, she said'
mode of reporting. 18 As Anders Hansen notes in his book Environment,
media and communication ,

A major problem in criticism of 'media accuracy' is the notion that the per-
ceived inaccuracy is primarily a product of sloppy reporting [or]

...

downright

media distortion.

(Hansen, 2010: 89)

Sometimes, as the Boykoffs argue, inaccuracy can happen innocently as a
result of professional norms being adhered to by busy journalists. 19
The sustained visibility that climate change sceptics enjoyed in US broad-
sheets through the 1990s (and elsewhere in the news media) seems, in
hindsight, especially problematic when one considers who was funding
and disseminating much of the dissenting science. For instance, documents
obtained by Greenpeace under the United States Freedom of Information
Act reveal that the libertarian Charles G. Koch Foundation gave Willie Soon
two grants totalling $175,000 in 2005/6 and again in 2010. Meanwhile, Soon
received grants from the American Petroleum Institute between 2001 and
2007 totalling $274,000, and grants from oil company Exxon Mobil amount-
ing to $335,000 between 2005 and 2010. While there's no evidence that
Soon, and other scientific dissenters like him, forged, trimmed or 'cooked'
data to suit the perceived agendas of these funding bodies, it illustrates
graphically how closely linked politics and science have been in the con-
trarian camp. A number of companies that stand to suffer financially from
governmental controls on current levels of atmospheric GHG emissions,
and a set of conservative and libertarian think tanks/foundations, have spent
considerable money, time and energy since the early 1990s doing two things,
namely (1) searching assiduously for research findings that contradict the
IPCC scientific consensus; and (2) lobbying the news media, notable aca-
demics (like Professor Fred Seitz (1911-2008)) and elected politicians to take
notice of these findings. 20
I'm not suggesting that the broadsheets analysed by the Boykoffs
shouldn't have reported science that questioned the IPCC consensus.
Respected experts such as Judith Curry (an atmospheric scientist at Georgia
Institute of Technology) and John Christy (another atmospheric scientist,
but at the University of Alabama) have, at times, voiced scepticism about
the messages contained in the Panel's assessment reports. 21 In its desire to
create clear headline messages for public and political consumption, the
IPCC may have glossed disagreements among the scientists whose research
it has periodically reviewed. As Daniel Sarewitz has opined in the pages of
Nature ,'The

...

idea that science best expresses its authority through con-
sensus statements is at odds with a vibrant scientific enterprise' (Sarewitz,
2011: 7) . 22 In this light, a better self-regulated press would have sought
to disaggregate and properly contextualise different forms of climate change