Last week Lismore s Deputy Mayor Neil Marks was joined by local state MP Janelle Saffin and MLC Ben Franklin to officially cut the ribbon on the $8.2 million South Lismore Flood Mitigation Project, but there are divergent views on how best to deal with the flood threat in future.
Mia Armitage & Sean O’Shannessy
When the proof is in the pudding and the spice is climate change, it can leave a bitter taste: after all, it’s no surprise to learn data shows Murdoch media bias.
But in a media environment where hard stats are ever more crucial towards revealing truth, knowing your eyes and ears aren’t deceiving you – and NewsCorp really has been – is something like the sugar needed to help the medicine go down: the numbers don’t lie.
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21 December 2020
It’s no secret that News Corp, the massive global media force headed by the recently-vaccinated Rupert Murdoch isn’t particularly fond of climate action. Its record over the past decade on obfuscating the science of climate change through a blend of straight mis-reporting and columnist noise is simply too big to even begin to summarise. From Lomborg to Shellenberger, from Plimer to Abbott, it’s a gargantuan portfolio of simple, effective and unmistakably unique climate and energy focused misinformation.
A variety of editorials published in The Australian
Something significant has changed over the past couple of years. The social breathing room for the manifestation of old-school climate change denial has eroded, somewhat. When News Corp’s denialism flagship, The Australian, published an unintentionally hilarious opinion piece by climate denier Ian Plimer claiming that “There are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is
The Australian, though the newspaper had the lowest percentage of negative coverage at 38 percent.
The Daily Telegraph was the worst, with 58 percent of its pieces on climate change being negative.
This was partially skewed by the high frequency of opinion and commentary pieces. About 62 percent weren’t based on research or fact.
The other two surveyed papers were the
Courier Mail and
Herald Sun. Others owned by News Corp were excluded but still were likely to include climate denying material due to the syndication of columnists like Andrew Bolt, who was responsible for a large chuck of climate denial in the four surveyed papers.
“There are no climate change deniers around [in News Corp], I can assure you.”
But the evidence from this investigation proves him wrong. News Corp are relentlessly negative towards climate action, minimising climate damage, ridiculing people who care, questioning science, and sowing doubt and confusion.
The exhaustive study analysed
8,612 pieces of news, opinion, editorials and letters mentioning climate change across four News Corp publications –
The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, Courier Mail, and
The Australian – between April 2019 and March 2020, covering the worst bushfire season on record and the massive School Strike 4 Climate protests.
It found that an astonishing
45% of all News Corp climate coverage expressed scepticism in the reality of climate change.