Climate Communications: Climate media coverage lacks facts, say researchers

Climate Communications: Climate media coverage lacks facts, say researchers

Two professors took a look at how the media has reported on the topic of climate and found that almost all news reports leave out critical and basic facts about climate. A corollary is that instead of reporting facts and the use of logic that supports anthropogenic climate change, most turn to propaganda methods such as appeal to authority, fear, name calling (“deniers”), get-on-the-bandwagon and so on. Incredibly, as I was writing this post The Nature Conservancy sent an email fundraising solicitation which illustrates the point: the first sentence of the email makes 4 demonstrably false claims to create fear about changes in climate. “Factfulness” teaches us how to detect when we are being misled – this turned out to be classic example of a charitable organization making exaggerated claims not supported by reputable science organizations (IPCC, NOAA, The Royal Society).

This post may be the first of several on how climate communications has been badly bungled by reliance on propaganda methods, rather than sticking with facts and logic.

“Factfulness” is a must read book

“Factfulness” is a must read book

Factfulness is an important book that opens our eyes to how our views of the world have been skewed, if not corrupted, by poor thinking skills and various groups, including the media, that focus on the negative and often inappropriately generalize small issues into seeming huge problems. The reality, as well documented in this book, is that the world is getting better, often way better – which is surprising when we are buried in negativity all day, every day.

Great example of 100% false news (an oldie)

Great example of 100% false news (an oldie)

The illustration graphic is false, although you might believe it is true because most of the news media reported this topic, as illustrated in the graphic.

The reported information, however, is 100% false and is readily shown as false by a simple example (click through to read why its false). This incorrect information was widely reported and established as a fact. This occurred either because reporters had no understanding of what they report on (far too often to be the case) or because they deliberately misled their readers and viewers.

Journalism: How the media reports on murders of the transgendered – and how it conflicts with the data

Journalism: How the media reports on murders of the transgendered – and how it conflicts with the data

There are many news reports about a growing “epidemic” of transgender murders in the United States. However, the data show a nearly constant trend line from 2015 to 2019. Further, the transgender murder rate, based on the data, is 1/4th to 1/2 that of the overall U.S. population. (It is possible that the underlying data is poor, which the Human Rights Campaign hypothesizes – but news reports calling out an epidemic in the absence of data to support that are not even pseudo news reporting – they are creative fiction writing.)

All murders are wrong, period. Violence and hate are wrong, period.

This post is about news reporting, not the transgender community.

Gramblr Instagram photo uploader and malware botnot no longer available

Gramblr Instagram photo uploader and malware botnot no longer available

Instagram intentionally makes it very difficult to upload photos from a PC. Instagram wants everything to be smartphone-centric. Many people use a variety of tricks to get around this upload problem including processing photos on their PC or Mac and then transferring them to their phone or tablet for upload using the Instagram app.

Because of this (dumb) limitation of Instagram, users wanted an easy way to upload photos from their PC. A malware company developed Gramblr as an easy way to upload from your PC. Their software was very sophisticated on many levels, one of which was that it secretly viewed Youtube videos behind the scenes each time you upload a photo to Instagram. Their business model was to sell Youtube video views and likes, and to deliver those views through the Gramblr bot net.

As of the summer of 2019, Gramblr has disappeared and their website is gone. The Gramblr botnet has been shut down (or at least no new users will get infected).