“Climate change is real but it’s not the end of the world. And increasingly extreme statements by activists undermine environmental progress, say climate scientists.” – another post in our continuing look at poorly done climate communications tactics that are leading many to ignore the climate topic altogether.
PR stunts tend to backfire when they are hypocritical. Greta Thunberg sailed on a donated, crewed, luxury yacht to North America to avoid the CO2 emissions of air travel. But at least two (and likely 4) crew members crossed the Atlantic by air to support her effort. In her current crossing by a crewed, luxury yacht back to Europe, another crew member was flown across the Atlantic. Her travel by luxury yachts has produced significantly more CO2 than if she had simply flown herself. When this information becomes public, the climate message gets lost and viewed as hypocritical (which it is).
In 2016, Newsweek recalled 125,000 copies of this cover, which had been distributed nationwide. You can find copies today on Amazon or EBay. Newsweek blamed a subcontractor saying they had printed two separate editions in order to be prepared but their vendor shipped the wrong one. Newsweek has a history of publishing creative pre-written news stories rather than reporting on events after they have occurred.
When someone tries to persuade you of something that is not actually true, and the persuader knows it is not true, then the persuader is engaged in manipulation – versus argument or discussion.
A branding expert says climate communications must adopt even scarier sounding propaganda terminology, not based on the actual science, in order to frighten people in to taking action. He proposes terminology such as Global Meltdown or Scorched Earth, neither of which is accurate. He’s advocating the use of lies to persuade targets to adopt an agenda. This approach, however, is likely to backfire and turn people away from even listening to climate communications.
The claim that this is the shortest international bridge in the world is bogus because (a) both islands are in Canada, and (b) a shorter bridge between Spain and Portugal exists.
An Internet meme says “11 teens die each day from texting while driving”. This claim, however, is false. In 2017, an average of 6 teens died each day from all vehicle accident causes. Cell phone usage falls within the distracted driving category. According to the government, distracted driving accounts for 9% of all crashes – therefore, cellphone usage is even less than this.
I never knew – according to journalists we are expected to argue about inequality and victimization at the Thanksgiving holiday. Journalists have even prepared a handy guide detailing how to support the journalists’ own agenda! Who knew (besides journalists) that we are supposed to turn Thanksgiving into an opportunity for propaganda messaging?
Updated: Apparently this entire genre is a coordinated pseudo-news event intended to be shared on social media and get around Facebook’s algorithms that try to limit some news article distribution. It’s based on the pseudo-news event approach of creating a fake “us versus them” narrative. It is, in fact, 21st century click-bait and nothing more.
Media, notably spearheaded by The Guardian and the George Mason School of Journalism, have applied specific methods of propaganda messaging to create a campaign of carpet-bombing us with the invented terms “climate emergency” and “climate crisis”.
Other than most facts in the story were wrong, it was a fine news report. Not.
Both the AFP and Reuters have withdrawn/retracted the story claiming 100,000 children were in immigration detention due to Trump Administration policies because the data, which didn’t mean what they thought it meant, was from 2015, during a different president’s administration.