Were Losing the War on Science [View all]

[demmiblue]

Source: Wired

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Since then candidates such as Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Jill Stein, and Gary Johnson have all answered questions from ScienceDebate.org. But Otto has also seen a gradual erosion of science content in major media outlets. He’s horrified that the three presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton didn’t feature a single question about climate change.

“ScienceDebate was the only place that asked President-elect Trump any questions about climate change on the campaign trail,” he says. “Which was kind of a remarkable and sad development in our media.”

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“The purpose of a free press in a democracy is to hold the powerful accountable to the evidence,” Otto says. “Journalists have really lost sight of that purpose, of their entire reason for being.”

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Shawn Otto on the media:

“I was on a TV show not long ago, and we were talking about the book, and we were talking about climate, and the reporter clearly understood what the evidence was indicating about climate change, but when we were on the air he was very cautious about indicating what the evidence actually suggested. … And I talked to him about it afterward, and he said, ‘If I say that we think that climate change is actually happening—that that’s supported by the evidence—we’re going to just get tons of letters and emails, and it’s going to upset the news director and the station ownership, because it may affect our bottom line.’ And that is a great example of exactly what’s happening here.”

Read more: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/geeks-guide-shawn-otto/