False Balance - Examples From The Issue of Global Warming

Examples From The Issue of Global Warming

A study conducted by Jules Boykoff and Maxwell Boykoff found that in the case of global warming, for example, a much more apparent consensus within the scientific community had been reached than the media made it seem. NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress in 1988 that he was "99 percent certain" burning fossil fuels was one of the factors that caused temperatures to rise. That same year, the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC), which went on to produce a steady stream of reports supporting Hansen’s claim that humans are contributing to global warming. Yet, while over 3,500 articles on global warming appeared between 1988 and 2002 just in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, 53 percent of these stories gave roughly equal attention to scientists who expressed views that global warming was caused by humans as they did to those who said global warming was caused by nature.

Jules and Maxwell Boykoff use the lead paragraph of a 1992 front-page article from The Los Angeles Times, as an example:

The ability to study climatic patterns has been critical to the debate over the phenomenon called "global warming." Some scientists believe—and some ice core studies seem to indicate—that humanity's production of carbon dioxide is leading to a potentially dangerous overheating of the planet. But skeptics contend there is no evidence the warming exceeds the climate's natural variations.

This paragraph puts scientists against skeptics, as though both are on equal grounds of knowledge, when in reality the scientists (even in 1992) have far more reason to believe that humanity is causing temperatures to rise than skeptics have to disagree. Additionally, putting "global warming" in scare quotes implies that the phrase is lacking in legitimacy.