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Climate change likened to ‘Y2k scam’

One of the most arresting case studies in Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News, about the ‘churnalism’ of poor reporting/stories that is sweeping through the journalism industry as the result of its commercialisation, is about Y2K - the millennium bug.

Davies successfully shows how a ‘non-story’ fed itself, both politically and in the press, until it was a major moral panic that costs millions (and made some people millions), and took up a huge amount of column inches in newspapers and magazines worldwide. And at one minute past midnight on Jan 1, 2000… nothing happened. It was a fake story, blown up out of nothing. But that didn’t stop most major news outlets and governments acting as if it was real: check out this retro BBC map of ‘millenniun bug’ infected countries. For an even better BBC entry on the bug, the h2g2 website got it absolutely right… More »

Tags: BBC, blogging, blogs, churnalism, comment, Copenhagen, image, indtry, Journalism, language, Lomborg, magazines, media, news, newspaper, newspapers, politics, reporting, research, science, sharing, US

‘Churnalism’ strikes with earthquakes

News sites and the Associated Press in America are being criticized by a leading climate blog for failing to check the veracity of a report that was pushed in a press release last week, claiming that earthquakes are linked to global warming.

Did you miss it? This story was published on:

• Yahoo Biz
• Investigate Express.co.uk
• MSNBC
• Free Republic (grass roots conservatism)
• Ad Hoc News (says it all…)

Erm. That’s about it. Thanks to RyanM on the Climate Audit site, Sans Pretence, the comments on Pat Dollard, and Wesley Smith for picking up on the news items. As Wesley says, “Does anybody do any fact checking anymore? Or are the words “scientific study” on a press release all that it takes to make the news?” (filed under: Stupidity in Media). The story was picked up by a number of other climate and political blogs, many of which are providing normally excellent citizen journalism, and, as such, (e.g. Deprogram your mind) quickly removed.

So where’d they get the story? More »

Tags: bad practice, churnalism, media coverage