Dean Baker ridicules how our timidly our media is handling Republican denier politicians, in what will probably grow to become the biggest media story of this century: Climate Change and its many faceted repercussions.
Dean Baker is the Co-director, CEPR (The Center for Economic and Policy Research)
Treating Global Warming Denialism Like a Sex Scandal
By Dean Baker
Most people don't spend their days enmeshed in policy issues; they have jobs and lives. They rely on the media to let them know what is important. Unfortunately, this has generally not meant much coverage of global warming. The media have largely treated global warming as sort of a sidebar of interest to a narrow clientele, kind of like sailboat races.
Contrast the coverage of global warming with the near wall-to-wall coverage of Ebola back in the fall of 2014, a disease that infected a total of three people in the United States. Or, take the current coverage of ISIS. If we envision a worst case scenario for ISIS, there are probably several thousand times as many lives being put at risk by global warming than will ever be threatened by ISIS.
We got an excellent display of the media's ability to ignore global warming in the two presidential debates that took place immediately after the Paris climate talks. There was not a single question on global warming in either party's debate.
Part of the reason for ignoring the issue likely stems from the fact that one party insists that global warming is not happening, or at least that humans are not causing it. It is a basic tenet of the Republican Party that global warming is not an area for public policy.
If the point of not being a scientist is that they lack expertise on the topic, that's fine. Their responsibility is to find someone with expertise they can rely upon.
This means that the logical next step for a reporter being told by a Republican politician that they are not a scientist is to ask which scientists they are turning to for expertise on global warming. And, if they can't answer the question today, then the question should be asked again tomorrow and the next day and the next day.
And, the same question should be constantly posed to their staff. The public should know when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, as well as all the leading Republican presidential candidates, have something to say on global warming. Every day that passes without a clear answer should intensify the scandal of one of the country's major parties ducking what could well be the most important issue of the century.
Letting politicians escape accountability, by letting denier politicians move on without answering these difficult follow up questions on which experts are advising them (since many explicitly point out their own lack of expertise) is a glaring omission that should make their readers wonder what else these media sources are allowing to go unanswered on a very critical issue.