Floods, Climate Change and the Media

The floods in Australia had been dominating the news cycle for over a week now. To be fair on the news agencies with the spread of the water into New South Wales and Victoria this has been one of the larger ones of the last century. It is certainly not the largest but in the era of the talking heads media that has sprung up in the last 20 years it is certainly the largest.

As the waters recede and the TV shots show dry and muddy land the focus has switched to the cleanup efforts. The public response in terms of manpower has indeed been something to report about. The use of terms like "hero" has as usual been overdone. The use of the term "obviously" continues on unrestrained. When the latest crop of media reporters, we can hardly call and journalists any more, run out of date like how high the water has risen by necessity they need to fill in the empty space with whatever pops into their head. The art of journalism is a dying one. Facts are rarely checked and if they are single sourced so that these days anybody with Internet access and a couple of minutes on their hands can verify or more commonly find that the report is false or based on very dubious sources.

The field of climate change is a classic one I read a report talking about how the snow cover was receding. The report came from a member of NOAA in the United States. Visiting their website and looking at the snow cover date published on their own site the 2010 figure was the third-highest over the time this metric has been tracked. The report them was a complete fallacy disapproved by their own data. The mainstream media listens to the report never checks the source and reports the story has given. Sadly, given the number of people are actually check stories, this is all with the general public gets to hear. Given that they never get to find out the real facts it is easy to see why many still believe in this scientifically denuded field.