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    The Heartland Institute And Murdoch Media
    By Patrick Lockerby | February 20th 2012 08:32 PM | 18 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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    Retired engineer, 60+ years young. Computer builder and programmer. Linguist specialising in language acquisition and computational linguistics....

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    The Heartland Institute and Murdoch Media

    The Heartland Institute story broke on February 14th.  The revelation that anti-science bunkum has been funded by corporate dollars was no surprise to those of us who have been investigating these propaganda mills.  Peter H Gleik has confirmed that he was the one who obtained the secret documents.  In confirming that he got them straight from the Heartland Institute he also confirms their authenticity.

    The world at large also needs to know that Rupert Murdoch's media empire - which often cites the Heartland Institute as a source for "climate science" - has managed to block publication of anything relating to this denialgate story in all but two of its outlets.

    At the time of writing, of the mighty magnate Murdoch's multiple media mouthpieces only The Australian has covered the denialgate news.  The story broke February 14th, but the Australian story was posted February 17th.  However, it was straight copy from an AP newsfeed.

    The other denialgate material was merely a pathetic bit of blogspin here and here by Andrew Bolt.

    In the UK, the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Times also failed to cover the story.  The Telegraph - or Toiletgraph as I prefer to call it - instead of this globally important news printed a nasty smear about how Richard Dawkins' ancestors kept slaves.  The Daily Mail, a newspaper which once prided itself on investigative journalism, recently managed to distort a news release from the U.K. Met Office so badly that the Met Office felt the need to post this response.  The Daily Mail and the GWPF seem to have a cozy relationship in which the GWPF gives "science advice" to the Daily Mail.  The Daily Mail is linked through Daily Mail and General Trust plc to DMG Radio Australia - whose chairman is Lachlan Murdoch - the eldest son of Rupert Murdoch.

    Not one of the following Murdoch "News" outlets has covered the Heartland Institute deniergate affair as far as I can ascertain:
    alicenow.com.au
    brooklyndaily.com
    brooklynpaper.com
    BxTimes.com
    couriermail.com.au
    dailytelegraph.com.au
    dailytidings.com
    djnewswires.com
    efinancialnews.com
    foxnews.com
    foxtel.com.au
    heraldsun.com.au
    marketwatch.com
    mxnet.com.au
    news.com.au
    ntnews.com.au
    nypost.com
    online.barrons.com
    online.wsj.com
    postcourier.com.pg
    sky.com
    sky.co.nz
    sky.de
    sky.it
    the-leader.com
    themercury.com.au
    thesun.co.uk
    thesundaymail.com.au
    thesundaytimes.co.uk
    thetimes.co.uk
    th-record.com
    timesledger.com


    A news blackout is a very old propaganda trick.  The hope is that the target audience will never hear the other side of the argument.  Meanwhile, the propagandist keeps repeating the same old propaganda slogans: it's the sun, it's cosmic rays, etc.

    Rupert Murdoch, like the old time radio broadcaster: "is a sovereign lord. He decides whether the event is spoken about at all, that is, whether it is broadcast."

    "One-sidedness is indispensable because the confusion around us is so great that every impression will quickly be shoved aside by a new one. Nothing is forgetful as the masses. Something can have appeared in a thousand newspapers and have been talked about by the millions, but a few months later it will be completely forgotten."
    quoted words from Eugen Hadamovsky.

    When it became known that our production of greenhouse gases was unsettling the world's climate system, the world's sovereign states joined together in an unprecedented attempt to identify and address the problem.  The sovereign states asked the world's scientists to investigate and the world's scientists responded.  Amongst those sovereign states were the U.S., Australia, Canada and the U.K.  It is in those countries that political think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the GWPF have been most actively engaged in trying to undermine the scientific base of evidence which informs our democracies.  It is notable that in order to undermine the scientific authority of the IPCC, the Heartland Institute funded the NIPCC.

    "And what do we do with this money? Well we in turn hire students whose job it is to review current papers in the literature and these are reviewed and get published in the NIPCC reports."
    Fred Singer

    So, do you trust some of the world's top climate scientists, or a bunch of students who are presumably told which cherries to pick?

    These and other paid propagandists have deliberately set out to undermine the democratic process by which climate policy is decided.  Under the guise of freedom of speech they have freely lied through their teeth for a few pieces of silver.

    Modern democracies depend on science for their very survival, and science depends on true freedom of speech.

    Fortunately, ordinary people are now waking up and smelling the bullshit.  They know they are being had.  You can fool some of the people some of the time, but when you place democracy itself in peril and think you can get away with it, then you fool only yourself.

    Democracy and freedom of speech are not for sale to the highest bidder - period.

    Comments

    Everything you say rings true - unless you happen not to trust completely in the scientific consensus (or more specifically, trust in the reliability of climate modelling forecasting).

    If you don't, suddenly many denialist tactics suddenly seem entirely reasonable - including the funding of scientists who seem to offer a 'voice of reason' amidst a cacophony of unreasonableness, Lacking government funding (which largely spends to appease the voters) for disseminating their views, it makes sense that any such scientists be funded by those in the private sector who are a position to do so, and logically, by those who stand to loose financially should unreason further dominate voter sentiments...

    By what other mechanisms would you propose the denialist message be widely disseminated?

    Paul King (not verified) | 02/21/12 | 00:08 AM
    logicman
    By what other mechanisms would you propose the denialist message be widely disseminated?

    Perhaps by means of personal blogs which, like mine, are not funded by anyone at all and which are written from a desire not to do other people's thinking for them.  :-)
    Patrick Lockerby | 02/22/12 | 11:18 AM
    MikeCrow
    But 10x the funding to promote lousy science is okay, and anyone who knows it's lousy science and says so is treated like a war criminal.
    —
    Never is a long time.
    Mi Cro | 02/21/12 | 10:34 AM
    logicman
    But 10x the funding to promote lousy science is okay

    I'm not funded at all, and I can say with some certainty, having researched the science and the history of the science in great depth, that the IPCC 2007 science report is factual and virtually error free.  The focus of deniers is on trivial errors in IPCC advice to policymakers.

    btw, the French scientists who contribute to the IPCC have just issued new findings which endorse the IPCC 2007 findings:

    Findings of the French simulations
    In keeping with the IPCC's conclusions of 2007, all scenarios predict a trend toward higher temperatures between now and 2100. The severity of the rise varies depending on the scenario under consideration, reaching 3.5 to 5°C for the most unfavorable but only 2°C for the most optimistic — a scenario that depends on the successful implementation of policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, it seems that natural factors alone cannot explain the average global warming observed since the second half of the 20th century.
    http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/1979.htm

    The full report - in French - is available here:
    http://www.bastamag.net/IMG/pdf/nouvelles_simulations_francaises_rapport_GIEC.pdf
    Patrick Lockerby | 02/22/12 | 11:25 AM
    MikeCrow
    Patrick, I'm not funded either, and I've gone straight to the actual temperature measurements.

    I also have over a decade using simulators, and I know how they can be biased, and I know how they don't come with a guide to explain their results.

    I also know that the value for climate sensitivity was chosen to get the results they wanted.

    As the link on the Solar Wind shows, the science isn't settled.

    You can see in the southern hemisphere daily min temps dropping, something that can't happen if co2 is blocking heat from being radiated into space. If you look at the daily diff over the last 50 years there's no trend, and the range of variability is much larger than a 0.1 degree/decade trend.

    What ever's happening it's not predominately being driven by co2.
    —
    Never is a long time.
    Mi Cro | 02/22/12 | 11:56 AM
    Hmmmm -- no word from Lockerby that Gleick has now admitted to wire fraud and other criminal offenses and that ALL evidence (except a denial from a now-known liar) indicates that it was Gleick who fabricated the Fakegate "memo" that added smoke and innuendo and fake motives to an otherwise yawner of a revelation that a private group takes private money to bring up highly inconvenient truths to a mostly lopsided "debate" over the cause of ever-constant climate change.

    Alex (not verified) | 02/21/12 | 10:38 AM
    logicman
    no word from Lockerby that Gleick has now admitted to wire fraud and other criminal offenses

    That's because I try very hard to write only what is true, so I tend to either ignore  or rebut the spin and exaggeration that bounces across the web every single day.

    Peter Gleick has admitted to a single wrong: impersonating a Heartland Institute member in order to obtain documents tending to prove or disprove the authenticity of an entirely unsolicited document he had previously received.   That unsolicited document is the one that Heartland is calling a fake - but its contents are reflected in the now public documents which have not been called out as fake.
    Patrick Lockerby | 02/22/12 | 11:32 AM
    MikeCrow
    BTW, you realize the first document is now thought/known to be a fake, and the rest of the documents Peter Gleick obtained he did under a false name.

    Meanwhile, the propagandist keeps repeating the same old propaganda slogans: it's the sun, it's cosmic rays, etc.
    Well maybe we still have something to learn on the Sun's influence.
    —
    Never is a long time.
    Mi Cro | 02/21/12 | 16:35 PM
    logicman
    Mi Cro: sorry, we cross-posted.  Please see my comment above.  I'm trying hard to catch up with comments while doing more research and writing follow-on articles such as Why I Am Peter Gleick
    Patrick Lockerby | 02/22/12 | 11:36 AM
    rholley

    Ahoy there, Patrick!

    A lot of stuff goin’ on there I didn’t know about.  Though I do have my reservations about “the democratic process by which climate policy is decided”.

    That is an interesting bit of historical scholarship about that Hadamovsky fellow.

    I can understand your frustration with the Telegraph.  How come they have for their environmental correspondent Geoffrey Lean, who seems to come out so often with things like “when I attended this plush environmental conference in Resorte de la Tropica”, or similar?

    But I don’t imagine that there was a conscious decision to favour the Dawkins news over that about Gleick.  And anyway, do you really feel the need to defend the Professor from the attentions of this lovely lady?


    —
    Robert H. Olley Quondam Physics Department University of Reading England
    Robert H Olley | 02/21/12 | 16:36 PM
    John Hasenkam
    Patrick,
    The Australian is probably the most anti-AGW newspaper in Australia, though I suspect it is moderating the tone these days(I don't read it much anymore because it is now behind a paywall). Murdoch took up US citizenship yonks ago. Yet another example of how Australia manages to export undesirables. 
    John Hasenkam | 02/21/12 | 22:23 PM
    vongehr
    democratic process by which climate policy is decided.  Under the guise of freedom of speech ...
    Modern democracies depend on science for their very survival, and science depends on true freedom of speech.
    You are very confused by your basic argumentative foundation of that everything you feel seems nice is democracy and science.
    Also, may I compare to the frenzy with which bloggers/scientists demanded to not link to or mention the Climate gate leak? Murdoch would do fine here, except that he does not need to command his underlings in this case anyway, since all this is simply a non-story. A privately funded think-tank is biased. Oh really? How does such compare to advocate bullies corrupting the very institutions of science from the inside? And look at the kinds of news outlets who refuse to really tackle that issue! You would not start that list with the dailymirror or some such, would you?
    Sascha Vongehr | 02/21/12 | 23:03 PM
    Hank
    It is telling that the blogosphere could only focus on how the emails were obtained when the East Anglia folks were shown conspiring to make sure no dissent occurred while in this case the Usual Suspects (on other sites anyway, Patrick is pretty middle-of-the-road, at least as I read him) were all just happy that a think tank was funding dissent and how that was gotten was unimportant.  Well, we knew that for years.  What is less often told is that advocacy groups like just Union of Concerned Scientists alone spend more in one year than all the denial groups combined spend in 8. 

    When even Andrew Revkin at the NY Times has to acknowledge Gleick likely faked the 'anonymous' climate strategy document he says he was mailed, that is big trouble.  It means there is now ammunition for others to wonder who else is so 'frustrated' they will lie and plant evidence.
    —
    Want more no-nonsense, independent science? Buy Science Left Behind
    Hank Campbell | 02/22/12 | 00:06 AM
    logicman
    Hank: I do indeed try to tread a middle path.  For instance, I am aware of the intellectual snobbery which prevails in some scientific circles and which can obstruct publication of papers which the 'establishment' doesn't like.  Just as newspapers tend to print retractions - if at all - in an obscure corner of an inside page, so do I find in old journals the occasional contrarian letter buried deep in a compilation of papers and not properly indexed.

    What I rarely find in scientific journals, however, is crank science.  There is a lot of stuff that skates over the thin ice of crankery - but I have never found anything suggestive of a coordinated effort to distort the truth.  By way of contrast, on the anti-science so-called skeptic side I find mostly hokum and bunkum and snake oil: only rarely do I find anything which deserves the name "science".

    There is nothing new in the modern fight against technological progress.  To cite but one example: Parliamentary Hansard records that when electrical power distribution was a new thing, the gas companies complained that the power stations were ugly and bad for the environment, that power lines were a public danger, an eyesore and a trespass on private lands and that the issue of government permits to build power stations and power lines would unfairly impact the rights of shareholders in the gas industry, would cost jobs and would damage the economy.  At that time Britain had a free press and propaganda was unheard of.

    Since that time we have seen a rise in knowledge of propaganda techniques.  We have seen before how a previously unknown corporal - using propaganda methods he had learned from the British - managed to persuade millions of people to elect him as their "champion of freedom and justice".  He was defeated by people such as Monckton's grandfather who insisted that truth shall prevail.

    What is that saying about not learning the lessons of history?
    Patrick Lockerby | 02/22/12 | 12:02 PM
    Hank
    What is that saying about not learning the lessons of history?
    It says what we all repeated as a platitude in our youth is now fully understood and realized.  :)
    —
    Want more no-nonsense, independent science? Buy Science Left Behind
    Hank Campbell | 02/22/12 | 14:04 PM
    MikeCrow
    fully understood and realized

    Only while the scar still hurts.
    —
    Never is a long time.
    Mi Cro | 02/22/12 | 14:48 PM
    "A privately funded think-tank is biased."

    Not exactly. These people claim to be running a charitable non-profit organisation, not a lobbying company. As a consequence, they pay no tax at all themselves. And those 'private' funds given to them by supporters also function as a means to reduce tax paid by those people. Getting taxpayer subsidies for yourself and others on the basis that your activities are 'charitable' when you're really running a 'biased' think-tank-cum-lobby group is not a good look.

    Heartland's role as one of the couple of dozen fronts advocating for almost 30 years for the tobacco companies (and asbestos and others) should give everyone cause to pause. Given that they've been on the wrong side - every single time - on such issues affecting public health, placing your bets on the same side as them is a seriously risky proposition.

    adelady (not verified) | 02/23/12 | 09:40 AM
    Well said adelady, what is more, when the tobacco Industry was finally called to task legally for their False Science in part propped up by this Institute and its 'Scientists', it was forced to publicly acknowledge its role. So I ask this, in regards to Tobacco we were looking at a Generation Affected, Global Warming however will affect us ALL. The Consequences of doing nothing and believing Skeptics as was done with Tobacco are MONUMENTAL. So this is what I ask, If it does in fact turn out that Groups like this have willfully worked to our Detriment... what should the Punishment be? Loss of Company? A Lifetime in Prison? Execution? We need to start thinking about a Punishment that fits the crime.. A Billion Dollar Fine and being forced to admit wrongdoing in Court seems like to little. These groups play with fire, and someday a Reckoning will occur.

    Truthsayer (not verified) | 02/25/12 | 22:44 PM