...or Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?
Here's the Fresh Air interview with Al Gore. Transcript is here.
GROSS: Let me mention a study that you cite in your documentary and your book, "An Inconvenient Truth." This is a study from the University of California at San Diego. A scientist there named Dr. Naomi Oreskes published in Science magazine a study of every peer-reviewed journal article on global warming from the previous 10 years, and then in her random sample of 928 articles, she found that no articles disagreed with the scientific consensus on global warming. Then another study on articles on global warming that were published in the previous 14 years in the press, specifically published in The New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and Wall Street Journal found that more than half of those stories gave equal weight to the scientific consensus and to the view that human beings played no role in global warming.Posted by jt at June 3, 2006 02:56 PM
So just to sum up the scientific journals, the scientists agreed about global warming, but in these four, you know, major American newspapers, equal weight was given in half the articles to the opposing view that human beings are not causing global warming. So what does that say to you? How do you interpret that?
Vice Pres. GORE: Well, it's astonishing. And that image in the movie and in the slide show that has preceded the movie is probably the one slide that has evoked more post-presentation commentary when people come up afterwards and ask questions than any other. And it does highlight the gulf between science and popular culture. C.P. Snow wrote years ago about the two cultures. I guess that gap is even wider now. But I think it illustrates something else in this instance. It illustrates the vulnerability of our marketplace of ideas, our public conversation, if you will, to manipulation by the kinds of techniques that were innovated early in the 20th century and were labeled propaganda. They're more sophisticated now, they're part of corporate PR strategies, they have been refined, and the nature of the news media has also changed, not in all media but in a lot. And, as a result, I think we're vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. I think we've seen it in other areas as well.