Green need to press the Press.

There are a lot of blacks who get really upset with Bill Cosby because he does not accept excuses for educational failures. His work in Detroit right now is a case in point. Cosby is willing to go door-to-door to say what he feels needs to be said, that people need to take responsibility for educational outcomes, no matter how bad the system is or now much racism still holds people back.

I feel that something similar needs to be said about the relationship between Greens and the media. There are many who would ignore what the deride as "corporate media." They know that the "corporate media" does not give Greens any space, or time, so they just don't try.

We need a Bill Cosby, who can say with conviction, that we help create our own vacuum. There is absolutely no reason that Greens can not be working the media in the same manner that the other parties do. It is all about building relationships. The more you get to know the hard working folks in the press, the more you realize that we are on the same side... telling the truth about the story of America. That is where the best of them are and it is easy to find them. You may have to read, or listen to, a bit of dreck, but the end result is that you will find reporters who are willing to carry a good story if you help them find it.

We have to do our home work if we expect to past the test. I am sure that Cosby would agree. There are no excuses for poor media coverage.

Media coverage of Global Warming.

I have on multiple occasions found reason to fault the media for taking the easy road, asking questions of any supposed player and then expecting the public to make up their own mind. This may be OK when there are no verifiable facts regarding the issue being presented, but it is inexcusable where one presenter lies misrepresents the facts.

But the biggest sin practiced by the media is to define news as old or to ignore it completely. That is exactly what nearly every major US media outlet has managed to do regarding the recent Copenhagen Climate Science Congress. This was a major meeting of 2000 scientists involved in the study of climate and the disruption of normal climate patterns that we are currently experiencing. More details by clicking Read more!


The Congress had 5 key findings. Any one of these would have been news had the media not been saturated with a universal reaming of AIG and their bonus policies. Some in the media, and almost all of the Republican Congressional delegation will say that the climate scientists have been alarmist, scaring people, fabricating data to keep their projects funded, etc. In fact, most scientist are so scared of the alarmist title that they have been conservative in their forecasts for future climate scenarios and almost universally wrong. The #1 finding from Copenhagen was:

Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized.

In the face of an increasing amount of data and an increasing imperative to take some action, the Republicans in the House of Representative are holding fast to their Do Nothing policies. In fact, it seems that they are so reactionary to have returned to the policies of one of their predecessors, the Know Nothing Party. That rather fits their immigration policies, but that is another story.

It is not unreasonable to claim that we are living in The Age of Stupid. As this UK Documentary looks back at our time from a not to distant future, it finds many instances of Know Nothing-ism and, sadly, too much of do-nothing form those who really understood but failed to act for one reason or another. That clearly defines the Republican (Know Nothing) and Democratic (Do Nothing Effective) stances.

At least, the UK Greens do not accept the status quo of the Age of Stupid. They turned out en masse to swell the numbers attending the public premier of this documentary.

Fidelity to Fact

I don't want to step on Alex's important post, but also want to make a real point about politics and the media. So, read what Alex wrote, and then click read more below to join me on the jump.


Following the presidential conventions, I knew that Bill Moyer's Journal would feature a conversation between Moyers and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. I tuned in to Moyer's Journal on PBS last night and was not disappointed. It was a particularly pointed conversation because both McCain and Palin had taken shots at the Liberal Media. Of course, Liberal Media Bias has always been part of the Rush Limbaugh rant and this time it became almost a chant in St. Paul.

What Jamieson did was to indicate that there is nothing sexist about the media questioning the readiness of any of the candidates.

Is it fair to ask about the experience of any candidate for vice president? Of course. Any candidate for president? Of course. And it isn't sexist or racist to raise that question.

However, she had little patience for those who, in the haste to break a story, get it wrong.

Now you have a moment in which journalism has deceived its audience because in the rush to make this point about possible hypocrisy, a major commentator (Soledad Obrien) on a major network (CNN) has asserted as fact something which doesn't hold up. It took the FactCheck.org researcher that I called on my staff about four hours to get back to the primary research documents.

In fact, the story that Soledad used had been circulating on the internet for a while before she, or her producer, grabbed it.

Moyer's raised the question that all of us should be asking, what are we to do when we can't trust the media. Jamieson had analyzed this in terms of the 2004 election.

The problem is that one can't trust anymore from some of these sources that there's going to be a fidelity to fact in the presence of contest. One of the things that we showed in 2004, from the National Annenberg Election Survey, was that those who are reliant on Rush Limbaugh and on Fox News accepted the Republican view of the facts.

Those reliant on NPR and CNN were more likely to accept the Democratic view of the contested facts. Now sometimes there's legitimate contest. Sometimes, however, what you essentially had was spin and distortion on each side. Those who are relying on newspapers and traditional forms of news were still more likely to hold a non-contested view of those facts.

The further we get away from any sense that elections have anything to do with the contest of ideas. the more I sense that we are vulnerable to a fascist pupulism and that scares the hell out of me especially as newspapers seem to be losing readership daily.

Obama McCain Energy Smackdown

Sheril Kirshenbaum is both a scientist and a writer with political savvy. She is an active blogger at ScienceBlogs.com, writing both on the Intersection (with Chris Mooney) and on the energy blog, NextGen, an energy blog effort funded by Shell.


In today's posts (both places) Kirshembaum writes about the McCain / Obama Energy Policies. While Obama responded to a questionnaire, McCain has failed to do so. I am not surprised.

I think you all should read the pieces, but I will take the comments that I left at NextGen and paste them here.

I don't get it. McCain says that he wants to address global warming, sets a target that is not going to really do the job, and then comes out with a list of policies that guarantees the fact that we will never achieve the target.

And not one calls him on it?

The Republicans complain about liberal bias in the press and then the press lest him get away with this. Complain about liberal bias, arrest Amy Goodman, and you can get away with saying anything as long as you sound sincere.

I am waiting for a journalist with a real understanding of the science to drill down though the muck and make both of these candidates explain the inconsistencies in their public statements.

The key point that I am getting at is that you can make lowering gas prices and feeding America's energy addiction as your main emphasis, but you will do so at the price of making global warming worse. In the long run, that is one dumb decision.

We don't know how to control nuclear waste. We have no policies at all about controlling nuclear contamination of mining, transportation and storage of uranum before it is used. But, both of these candidates would give even more of our tax dollars to the nuclear industry and McCain does not want to "interfere with the market" by subsidizing renewable systems like solar or wind. This is not the action of anyone who should board a straight talk express.

The same goes for policies regarding coal. Lots of people involved in coal mining and they all vote. Nope, we will not stop burning coal as long as their is a politicians who would rather be elected than stop slow down global warming. I hate the idea of quoting John Stossel but "Give me a break."