The Tracker is posting this while holding it at arm’s length. I’ve noted with some dismay the tepid response by most US media to the problems, and hints of welcome tightening and perhaps wide reform, facing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But here’s a piece of somewhat the same mind but that hits me as ludicrous. It also is hard to dismiss in its entirety. It ran in Britain’s right-of-centre Spectator, where science writer and book author Matt Ridley lionizes the dedicated bloggers, mostly of the skeptical sort,  who busted up the public’s perception of scientific consensus on climate change.  The result, Ridley writes, is to reveal most mainstream journalists as poodles on the leashes of their establishment sources.

It’s just an opinion, but it’s mine and here it is: this piece reflects only preening, self-congratulation in the on line world of the mad. Ridley, a prize winning journalist and chronicler of evolutionary biology, in this instance and on the climate front mistakes a bloggy victory in the political and public opinion battlefield for a strike for truth, justice, and the advancement of humanity.

Here’s the catch. For all of his indiscriminate admiration for the chattering snorters who share his distrust of government and seem to think “Al Gore” is an expletive, Ridley puts his finger on some real problems in standard journalism. They go beyond the failure of publishers to make the 20%-plus profit margins to which they had been accustomed. That is that the sheer energy and tenacity that once was the glory of big-time journalism does seem to have migrated to the internet – a place woefully free of the sort of editing restraints and codes of conduct (such as fact-checking) one hopes to find in the news room. But it definitely is lively.

I don’t have further comment about this article but wonder if any of you out there do.

Pic – source Wired.co.uk

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 12:56 pm and is filed under About Journalism, Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.