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Los Angeles Times makes it official — “Mainstream” Media decides what the hoi polloi are allowed to know [Darleen Click]

LASlimes has declared Anthropomorphic Global Warming as unassailable science.

In a stunning move that some scientists are decrying as blatant censorship, The Los Angeles Times is no longer publishing letters from those who deny climate change.

“Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published,” writes Times letters editor Paul Thornton. “Saying ‘there’s no sign humans have caused climate change’ is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.”

William Happer, a physics professor at Princeton, tells Fox News that the Times “should be ashamed of itself” regarding this decision.

“There was an effective embargo on alternative opinions, so making it official really does not change things,” adds Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism at The Rockefeller University in New York.

“The free press in the U.S. is trying to move the likelihood of presenting evidence on this issue from very low to impossible,” J. Scott Armstrong, co-founder of the Journal of Forecasting and a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told Fox News.

Happer, Breslow and Armstrong are among 38 climate scientists who penned a letter titled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” for The Wall Street Journal in January 2012 which argued that the call to “decarbonize” the world’s economy isn’t supported by science.

But of course, Thorton’s decision is being applauded by other AGW cheerleaders …

Elaine McKewon authored of an Australian study of newspaper coverage of climate change and told Readfern she hoped the Times’ decision would provide “other mainstream media outlets the courage to stop appeasing the climate denial noise machine.”

In the scientific community, the debate about anthropogenic global warming has been over for decades. The scientific consensus on climate change is as strong as the consensus on human evolution or the link between smoking and cancer.

Oh the irony of SCIENCE! behaving like The Spanish Inquisition.

BURN the non-believers!

41 Replies to “Los Angeles Times makes it official — “Mainstream” Media decides what the hoi polloi are allowed to know [Darleen Click]”

  1. Drumwaster says:

    Eppur si muove

  2. dicentra says:

    Oh the irony of SCIENCE! behaving like The Spanish Inquisition.

    “Science” is as science does. These people aren’t scientists; they’re inquisitors in lab coats.

  3. geoffb says:

    And others.

    Away from the letters pages, the US magazine Popular Science announced last month it was going to take away the ability of readers to comment on its stories online, because of concerns that “trolls and spambots” could “skew” their readers’ understanding of the issues being covered. In a story justifying the move, Popular Science’s online content director Suzanne LaBarre wrote:

    A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

    […]

    Thornton’s decision could well leave a few editors wondering if they should follow suit.

    Julie Lewis, who is the co-editor of the Sydney Morning Herald’s letters page, for example, told me by email the Herald letters team is planning to make a statement to readers outlining the paper’s approach to climate change and letters.

  4. McGehee says:

    L.A. Times? Popular Science? What they say is unimportant…

  5. epador says:

    Nemo expectat Inquisitione Hispanica

  6. SBP says:

    Right. My first thought was “The Los Angeles Times? That still exists?”

  7. SBP says:

    http://www.theawl.com/2009/10/a-graphic-history-of-newspaper-circulation-over-the-last-two-decades

    Note that this chart ends in 2009. Things haven’t gotten any better for them since then.

  8. happyfeet says:

    the brokedick LA Times doesn’t even try to sell its ad space with research anymore

    basically if you have extra budget and you want to take a stab at selling stuff to a handful of fascists cunts in Los Angeles over the age of 65 you buy ads in it

    otherwise you make a grown up serious media plan

  9. cranky-d says:

    L.A. Times? Popular Science? What they say is unimportant…

    and we do not hear their words.

  10. geoffb says:

    L.A. Times? Popular Science?

    What this says to me is that there are at least two distinct classes of “Low Information Voters” out there and that someone is worried about this particular one staying on the LoFo farm.

    And if there are two then more are quite likely. Ripe pickings, the media will let us know where they are.

  11. geoffb says:

    I bet they [think] know what “Man Made Global Warming” is and that it is caused by evil corporations and conservatives.

  12. Blake says:

    Elaine McKewon author[ed] of an Australian study of newspaper coverage of climate change…

    I think the new Australian PM sacked the minister in charge of global warming or some such.

    Ah, the climate change commission was sacked. link.

    Way to keep up with the latest most current events, LA Times.

  13. geoffb says:

    [think they]

    I miss preview.

  14. Blake says:

    One more time. Link

  15. LBascom says:

    Cheer up geoffb, I bet those college students could name every character in the Harry Potter books, and what Kim Kardashian ate for dinner last week.

    I mean, you don’t have to know stuff like history these days gramps, if it’s important you can google!

  16. Ernst Schreiber says:

    [T]he US magazine Popular Science announced last month it was going to take away the ability of readers to comment on its stories online, because of concerns that “trolls and spambots” could “skew” their readers’ understanding of the issues being covered. In a story justifying the move, Popular Science’s online content director Suzanne LaBarre wrote:

    A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

    When expertise ceases to be motivated by politics, there won’t be any reason to war on it in kind anymore, will there?

    Like a wise man once said, concensus isn’t science.

  17. cranky-d says:

    Ulcers are caused by stress! That’s the consensus! Pay no attention to the two guys who proved they are caused by bacteria!

  18. palaeomerus says:

    I am not anti-science; I am anti -Lysenkoism, anti-flim-flam, and anti-pseudoscience.

  19. SBP says:

    Popular Science is like Scientific American. Two lies, one title.

  20. christopher swift says:

    I wonder how long it will be before LAT begins to refer to obozo as “Our Dear Leader” and reports completely bogus economic stats? And the unemployment number is meaningless, because the only unemployed are those who are resisting his efforts to build a more perfect society.

  21. SBP says:

    And what will the chocolate ration be?

  22. Silver Whistle says:

    But tractor production is at a new record level.

  23. leigh says:

    I watched “Dr. Strangelove” last night and it seemed oddly prescient.

    We can wait for the Doomsday Machine.

  24. BigBangHunter says:

    – The Proggies are really starting to feel the pressure and over react to the falling temps and non-extreme climate records being set for the past 15 years.

    – They will try to shut down all decent until things change again. At some point people will just start laughing at them outright.

  25. dicentra says:

    I watched “Dr. Strangelove” last night and it seemed oddly prescient.

    It’s also where the European concept of “cowboy diplomacy” comes from: Slim Pickins riding that bomb all the way down, hootin’ and hollerin.

    Having never met any real cowboys — who tend to be laconic, slow to anger, and practical — Europeans have to rely on their superior cinematic knowledge.

  26. Drumwaster says:

    “Chong Wang? What kind of name is that for a cowboy?”

  27. sdferr says:

    With apologies for the abuse to Mr. Hume: whether of superior cinematic or possibly, synaesthesic knowledge, those UpperCrustians provoke many a dispassionate onlooker to inquiring “Will you be leaving the upper floor chamber (in which you contentedly superior Euros find yourselves) by means of the door or by that window there, now that you may apply your choosing?”

  28. John Bradley says:

    It’s all fun and games until the defenestration starts.

    Though personally I’m hoping that “when the changeover comes” the angry mobs will be dealing with our former elite though a process of refenestration. With catapults. More sporting that way. After all, anybody can throw someone out a window – it takes a reasonably skilled marksman to throw someone into a window, from the ground. Makes for great spectacle.

  29. sdferr says:

    Ah, but to be fair, Mr. Hume was inquiring as to a genuine choice, i.e. to self-defenestrate, and not as to the possibility of an enforced such act.

    Cleanthes: *** Whether your skepticism is as absolute and sincere as you claim is something we shall learn later on, when we end this little meeting: we’ll see then whether you leave the room through the door or the window; and whether you really doubt that your body has gravity and can be injured by its fall — which is what people in general think on the basis of their fallacious senses and more fallacious experience. And I think that this consideration of the test of skepticism in everyday life can fairly serve to make us less angry with this whimsical sect of the skeptics. If they are wholly sincere, they won’t trouble the world for much longer with their doubts, niggles, and disputes; and if they are only joking, they may perhaps be bad comedians but they can never be very dangerous to the state, to philosophy, or to religion. ***

  30. LBascom says:

    This is the best series of temperature graphs blowing the idea od AGW all to hell I’ve ever seen. This dude not only makes the point, he takes the AGW crowd look beyond stupid and well into the snake oil salesman category.

    The only bad part…looks to me we’re way past due for an ice age.

  31. serr8d says:

    OT, Darlene. seems California’s High Speed Rail has lost a step..

    http://phys.org/news/2013-10-calif-bullet-locals-angry.html

  32. geoffb says:

    The only bad part…looks to me we’re way past due for an ice age.

    Right there is your proof that global warming is taking place and we should all be mightily thankful for it too.

  33. SBP says:

    “After all, anybody can throw someone out a window – it takes a reasonably skilled marksman to throw someone into a window, from the ground.”

    The difficulty in throwing someone out depends on whether you have a target. There’s a scene in an early Tim Powers novel:

    “If I should happen to be killed. . . will you see to it that my body is cremated?”

    “Cremated? Very well,” Duffy said slowly. “The priests wouldn’t like it, but I guess there’d be no reason for them to hear about it. You might outlive me, of course. Why do you want to be cremated?”

    Bluto looked uncomfortable. “I guess if you accept the charge you deserve the explanation. Uh. . . my father was a hunchback, like myself. The whole line may have been, for all I know. He died when I was two years old. A cousin told me the following story, late one night; he was drunk, but swore it was true, that he’d been there.”

    “For God’s sake,” said Duffy. “Been where?”

    “To my father’s wake. Be quiet and listen. My father committed suicide, and the local priest said everybody’s ancestors would be dishonored if my father was to be buried in consecrated soil. It was just as well — I don’t think the old man would have wanted it anyway. So a bunch of his friends carted his body to an old pagan burial ground a few miles outside of town.” He had another pull at his beer and continued. “There was a little house there, with a table, so they dug a grave right out front, broke out the liquor, and laid the corpse out on the table. But he was a hunchback, as I’ve said, and he wouldn’t lie flat. It wouldn’t do to celebrate the wake with him face down, either — bad luck or something — so they found a rope somewhere, ran it over Dad’s chest, and tied it under the table so tightly that he was actually pressed flat. So, now that the guest of honor was properly reclining, they hit the liquor. By nightfall a lot of other people had shown up; they were all crying and singing, and one of them was embracing the corpse. . . and he noticed the bowstring-taut rope.”

    “Uh-oh.”

    “Right. Nobody was watching him, so he sneaked out his knife and sawed through the rope. My father’s corpse, with all that spring-tension suddenly released, catapulted right out the window. It scared the devil out of the mourners until the knife-wielder explained what he’d done. They went outside to bring the body back in, and saw that it had landed just a few feet to one side of the grave they’d dug. So they dragged him back inside, tied him down again, moved the table a little, made a few bets, and cut him loose again. Boing. Out he went. On the fourth shot he landed in the grave, and they filled it in and went home.”

    “Good holy Christ!” Duffy exclaimed. “I think your cousin was lying to you.”

    “Maybe. But I want to be burned.”

    “Look, just because something like that happened to your father –”

    “Burned, Duff.”

  34. Slartibartfast says:

    This is the best series of temperature graphs blowing the idea od AGW all to hell I’ve ever seen.

    This one might be a close second.

  35. Parker says:

    Darleen –

    Late to the party with a minor correction – your lead in should say ‘Anthropogenic’ rather than ‘Anthropomorphic’.

    Unless you mean ‘man-shaped’ global warming rather than ‘man-caused’ global warming.

    That would make a cool villain for Captain Planet, though…

  36. Ernst Schreiber says:

    The alarmist case for anthropogenic global warming did go pear-shaped, did it not?

  37. richard mcenroe says:

    By an amazing coincidence, the LAT and SMH declarations of censorship are almost word for word identical.

  38. Spiny Norman says:

    Oddly enough, the LAT and SMH have virtually identical political bias.

  39. SBP says:

    Both of them basically just print George Soros press releases.

  40. leigh says:

    SMH?

Comments are closed.