By Paul Homewood
More from the climate kooks who want to control what you see and read in the mainstream media about climate change:
A Gulf of Mexico Capitulation
“When the other three estates fail, when the judiciary and the executive and the legislative branches fail us, the Fourth Estate has to succeed,” actor George Clooney said last Sunday on CBS’s 60 Minutes, America’s top rated TV news program for 50 years. Clooney was promoting his appearance in the Broadway production of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” his 2005 movie about Edward R. Murrow, the legendary CBS News broadcaster who, in the 1950s, stood up to the witch hunting of McCarthyism. A lesson from that era applies today as well, Clooney added: “Journalism and telling truth to power has to be waged, like war is waged. It doesn’t just happen accidentally. It takes people saying, ‘We’re going to do these stories and you’re going to have to come after us.’"
Unfortunately, America’s major TV networks sent quite the opposite message in their coverage of stranded NASA astronauts’ return to Earth. Eagle-eyed media writer Oliver Darcy disclosed the details in his Status newsletter, focusing on the refusal of ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and CNN “to call the body of water [the astronauts] splashed into…. the Gulf of Mexico, the water feature’s name since the 16th century.”
“Instead,” Darcy continued, “television news organizations tied themselves in knots, performing linguistic gymnastics to stay out of Donald Trump’s crosshairs, while also tiptoeing around audiences who would have surely been incensed to see them bend the knee and call it the ‘Gulf of America.’"
The corresponding question for climate reporting almost asks itself: Will US broadcasters now be similarly squeamish about stating as fact the long-settled science that climate change is real, extremely dangerous, and caused mainly by burning fossil fuels? Will news organizations perhaps stop using the term “climate change” altogether, now that Trump has had it removed from many government websites? Such self-censorship would not only mislead the public but betray journalism’s civic responsibility to hold power accountable. “Words are the front lines of truth,” Darcy wrote, “and once they’re ceded, it becomes far easier for strongmen like Trump to shape reality.”
The deeper problem is that journalists are under pressure not only from Trump but from their corporate owners. It’s no accident that ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN all capitulated by employing “off the coast of Florida” or other euphemisms for the Gulf of Mexico, Darcy argued. Broadcast news operations, he noted, have “standards departments” that rule on what their reporters can and cannot say on the air — departments that answer to corporate superiors.
What planet do these numbskulls live on?
The suggestion that the media tiptoeing around climate change is ridiculous. I barely know any newspapers of TV channels who have not gone overboard with their alarmism, either in this country or the States.
As for that well known deep thinker, George Clooney, what does he think the Fourth Estate, or the judiciary for that matter, have been doing since Trump was originally elected in 2016?
The last nine years have been marked by incessant media lies from the likes of CNN and NBC about Trump, as well as outright lawfare against him by the politicised DOJ and far left activist judges.
As for the Gulf of America, it was originally known variously as “The Sea of the North”, “Gulf of Florida” and “Gulf of Cortes” by early Spanish explorers. Names change over time, CCN – get used to it!