General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThis is one of those places I too draw the line. Time to rethink my NYTimes subscription
HomepageThinkProgress
HOMECLIMATEPOLITICSWORLDHEALTH CARERELIGIONFEATURESVIDEOLATEST
Go to the profile of Joe Romm
Joe Romm
Dr. Joe Romm is Founding Editor of Climate Progress, the indispensable blog, as NY Times columnist Tom Friedman describes it.
Apr 15
New York Times defends hiring extreme climate denier: millions agree with him
The Times replaces search for truth with search for popular ideas that are false. But would they hire a Holocaust denier?
CREDIT: Flickr/Scott Beale/Laughing Squid
Amidst backlash and subscription cancellations for hiring extreme climate science denier, Bret Stephens, the New York Times offered a stunning defense: There are millions of people who agree with him.
With that logic, the Times could hire as a columnist former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke or a flat earther or someone who thinks vaccines pose a health hazard. After all, millions agree with them.
Screenshot of a typical pop-up ad in the NY Times new ad campaign.
This defense is especially absurd since, as I detailed Friday, the Times has been running a major ad campaign claiming there is no alternative to the truth and former Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page editor Stephens has repeatedly dismissed as imaginary the climate reality reported on every week by the Times own journalists.
But apparently the Times editorial page is not engaged in a search for the truth. Instead, it is engaged in the search for popular ideas to spread even if they are known to be false alternative facts.
After hyping itself as antidote to fake news, New York Times hires extreme climate denier
New columnist Bret Stephens dismisses as imaginary the climate reality routinely reported by the Times. They cant
thinkprogress.org
Indeed, James Bennet, the Times editorial page editor, told The Huffington Post on Friday that to pretend like the views of a thinker like Bret, and the millions of people who agree with him on a range of issues, should simply be ignored, that theyre outside the bounds of reasonable debate, is a really dangerous form of delusion.
No one is saying climate science denial should be ignored. Yet rather than embracing denial, as the Times editors are now doing, they should be debunking it, something that the news section of the paper does on a routine basis.
Now heres where the Times defense gets especially Orwellian:
The charge that Stephens is a climate denialist is terribly unfair, Bennet said. Theres more than one kind of denial, he continued.
But just two weeks ago, in a story on the deniers in the Trump administration, the Times itself labeled those who deny the established science of human-caused climate change climate change denialists!
And while its true that theres more than one kind of denial, Stephens is clearly one the most extreme deniers in the country, as a reading of his Wall Street Journal columns makes clear. Climatologist Michael Mann emailed ThinkProgress that Stephens was one of the most notorious climate change deniers.
To quickly review, a 2008 column titled, Global Warming as Mass Neurosis, begins, last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. In 2009 he directly compared climate scientists and those who accept their finding to Stalinists, anti-Semites and Communists.
Climate scientists around the world debunk Wall Street Journal Stalinist screed
thinkprogress.org
In 2015, he called concern over climate change hysteria and wrote that global warming along with hunger in America, campus rape statistics, and institutionalized racism are imaginary enemies. He is so extreme that he dismissed the well-documented vanishing polar ice as based on flimsy studies when in fact it has been unbelievably well documented, including by the Times itself.
And while the Times asserts that Stephens brings to the paper, profound intellectual depth, honesty and bravery, Stephens wont even stand by what he wrote for the Journal. He actually told the Huffington Post he is a climate agnostic.
I defy anybody to read his entire November 2015 column (let alone all the others) and assert Stephens is agnostic on climate change. That is the very definition of an alternative fact.
In a statement to Huffington Post, Stephens wrote Is the earth warming? Thats what the weight of scientific evidence indicates. Is it at least partially, and probably largely, a result of man-made carbon emissions? Again, that seems to be the case.
Seriously? His 2015 Wall Street Journal column ends by offering a climate prediction for the year 2115:
. Temperatures will be about the same.
He and the Times are playing their readers for suckers if the goal is to feature controversy and obtain more readers. Like United Airlines, the Times would be valuing profits more than its customers. But if this is a play for more readers, clicks, and subscriptions, it may not be as successful as the Times would hope.
Subscribers such as climatologist Ken Caldeira are opting out.
Climate ChangeEnvironmentClimateMediaScience
Go to the profile of Joe Romm
Joe Romm
Dr. Joe Romm is Founding Editor of Climate Progress, the indispensable blog, as NY Times columnist Tom Friedman describes it.
ThinkProgress
ThinkProgress
Moving news forward.
still_one
(92,526 posts)dchill
(38,626 posts)If you're going to hire a purveyor of pure falsehood to increase readership, you're NOT a news organization any longer. You're a FOX.
jackssonjack
(79 posts)spanone
(135,950 posts)babylonsister
(171,111 posts)WePurrsevere
(24,259 posts)Here's the email address their link gave me: executive-editor@nytimes.com
Briefly tell him why you're not happy about this, your expectations of a reputable news company, etc.
I have very limited resources but was offered a great sale price on a monthly subscription last month so decided to go for it since it seemed like they had started going in a better direction. If this is how they show their sincere desire to only go with facts now I'll find a different source and cancel NYTs. This is too important an issue for them to give legitimacy to by hiring a denier.
zentrum
(9,866 posts)ProudLib72
(17,984 posts)That was NYT's credibility.
beam me up scottie
(57,349 posts)Horseshit.
He's as much of a coward as vaccine "agnostics" who don't want to be lumped in with their batshit crazy brethren. These people call themselves 'skeptics' because they know if they publicly admit that they're science deniers and conspiracy mongers no one will take them seriously.