Kenny is very upset by Paul Barry’s presentation of Media Watch (Feb 3 this year) in which Barry discussed the views of several well-known right wing journalists and had videos of them stating their views. No doubt he would also be upset by the Four Corners program on the ABC the same night, by the way Jim Molan was exposed on Qand A, and by the film and panel discussions on Nine’s 60 Minutes last night (Feb 9).
Kenny is writing under the heading: “Media Watch host Paul Barry fans flames, dodges climate change facts.” (The Australian, pay-walled)
“Fans flames.” A poetic touch.
“The ABC’s Media Watch, hosted by Paul Barry, claims the high moral ground, declaring it exposes “conflicts of interest, journalistic deceit, misrepresentation, manipulation and plagiarism”. But the problem is it is full of journalistic deceit, misrepresentation and manipulation itself.
“Rather than measure reporting against facts, the program weighs journalism he does not like against the opinions that dominate the left-green Zeitgeist.
“…it misrepresented people and facts in order to promote global warming alarmism and denounce News Corp journalism.
“…my repeated position… based on public scientific and expert documents was only that activists were grossly exaggerating the role of climate change.”
And here we come to the crux of the matter: there is News Corp climate change and there is “activist” alarmist, exaggerated climate change. And not just one News Corp climate change; there are many of them, as Kenny explains:
“Barry said we “all sing from the same song sheet on climate change”, when clearly we have differing views (perhaps from the groupthink of the ABC this diversity is hard to comprehend). What we have in common is a thirst for the facts, which we inject into the debate. But Barry’s critique avoids facts.”
So, in Barry’s presentation in which the people he was critiquing and who spoke for themselves on sound bites, there were no facts?
And of course, having no single coherent climate science is the major characteristic of sceptics/deniers.
Ian Plimer says CO2 has nothing to do with climate change; Bob Carter said CO2 is a greenhouse gas; Richard Lindzen says there has been no global warming in the past 20 years; Jennifer Marohasy says we need to keep assembling data more so we see the cycles which drive our weather events; Judith Curry says we will not see the really bad effects of climate change until the end of the C21st or into the C22nd; some people say volcanoes drive climate change; someone said climate is being driven by stream of photons coming from an exploded sun deep in the universe…
James, younger son of Rupert Murdoch, says that the Murdoch media is not doing enough on climate change.
In the WE Australian 8-9 Feb, Kenny said this:
“The climate election [May 2018] should have settled all this but, alas, the climate saga is alive again.
“[The climate saga] is “the ridiculous conscription of belief into science.”
That is, it is as Ian Plimer claims, just a primitive religion filling in a spiritual emptiness.
Kenny goes on:
“There is nothing about the climate debate in Australia that is normal. The level of misinformation is disturbing and deliberate. The amplification of the issue’s significance in this country by environmental, media and political activists is inversely proportional to the nation’s global role in the solution.
“Paul Barry also misrepresented Rowan Dean [Spectator Aust. Editor] ‘who says climate policy in Australia could only have a small (1,3 percent) effect on bushfire intensity’.”
Kenny tried to defend his position, of not being in denial, by quoting himself from the past:
(Dec 14, 2019) “The expert analysis shows that if there is a long term influence from either of these blights [bushfires and drought], it will be to make each of them slightly more common in a land where they are common already. Whatever Australia does on carbon emissions can have no impact on any of this, at least for decades to come as global emissions continue to rise.
(Jan 18, 2020) “The reason these climate changes should be relatively marginal in the discussion is that they relate to making an existing catastrophe slightly more common.”
“Slightly.” “Slightly more.”
So what is all this chatter and palaver all about. It is really about the word “unprecedented.” Kenny refuses to acknowledge what so many people are saying, people who were there, that they had never seen anything like the fires we saw recently. Kenny is not reminding us about this in detail or what he said in defiance of this common exclamation, that there is nothing “unprecedented” about these latest fires.
Back in Jan 18, 2020, Kenny listed three fires which he claimed were “even worse” because more people tragically died in these fires than in the recent fires. That was the extent of his research and attention to verifiable information.
See what he says back then:
“Media Watch focused on how some of us challenged and exposed claims made as far back as November that this season’s fires were unprecedented.
“We did this through diligent attention to verifiable detail and historical records.
“Barry dismisses these assessments, not based on facts, but based on opinions he prefers.
“Some of his preferred opinions were from authoritative voices but were still but opinions – what matters are facts.
“Clearly his [Barry’s] thesis, his whole show, is not about facts, fairness and reality, it is about distorting reality so he can share the vibe of the climate activists.”
So we are told here that there are the facts of the News Corp journalists and there are the mere opinions of climate alarmists and other people of opinion. There is the balanced science of the journalists, and there is the beat-up exaggerations of the climate activists. Fires over the past 6 months or so, over most states, are only “slightly” different from fires in the past. Only Murdoch Media people know the truth, the “real” truth, not just opinions.
Then of course we could go to other news sources and see the real facts about the recent fires: the number of people who tragically died, the number of houses and property destroyed or damaged, the extent of the burnings across most states, the destruction of livestock and wild animals, destruction of the environment, the insurance costs, the costs of lost income, the cost of time and energy taken up with fighting the fires, the on-going costs…
You will not find anything like it by looking into the past 200 years in Wikipedia or somewhere. These fires are unprecedented!
And what of the future?
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