r. carey gersten » news

Credible information sources: One man’s guide

Carey — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:19:27 +0000

The Newstand in Bellingham. (Photo: Bob Simmons)

Struggling print and online media often skip the substance. That leaves information consumers struggling to assemble our own sources of reliable reporting and analysis.

By Ted Van Dyk | Crosscut.com | March 03, 2010

President Obama is disclosing his end-game strategy for his health-care legislative proposals. Like so many political events, his announcement is provoking a flood of analysis and commentary by media and think-tank types who both know and don’t know what they are talking about.

This raises questions about the information sources to which we refer and trust.

Read on: http://crosscut.com/2010/03/03/media/19636/?utm_source=Crosscut+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5310889433-Crosscut_E_mail_3_3_20103_3_2010&utm_medium=email

The O.J. tactic: Climate change skeptics sound like Simpson’s lawyers: If the winter glove won’t fit, you must acquit

Carey — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:19:45 +0000

By Bill McKibben – Guest Columnist | OregonLive.com | March 02, 2010, 5:00AM

Image: 2009 (c) Nancy Battaglia

In recent years, every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril of climate change. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the last two decades. And Earth’s major natural systems are all showing undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater and so on.

Yet because of a recent onslaught of attacks on the science of climate change, fewer Americans now believe humans are warming the planet than did just a few years ago.

The doubters of climate science have launched an enormously clever — and effective — campaign, and it’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy is perhaps the O.J. Simpson trial.

Read on: http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2010/03/the_oj_tactic_climate_change_s.html

[Bill McKibben is an author, environmentalist, and activist. In 1988, he wrote The End of Nature, the first book for a common audience about global warming. He is the co-founder of 350.org, an international climate campaign that organized the most widespread day of action on global warming in history.]

What’s in a name? When the issue is “climate change,” plenty, linguist says

Carey — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:21:33 +0000

by Robert McClure | Dateline Earth as reported on Investigate WEST | February 22nd, 2010

It’s been apparent for some time that the public is not understanding the potential magnitude of the threat of climate change. The percentage of Americans saying it’s even taking place was recently measured at 57 percent, down 14 points since October 2008, according to what appears to be a series of climate stories running this week on National Public Radio. (Recall that we’ve described before how even expert “skeptics” admit the warming is taking place; that big chunks of the public misses that is remarkable.)

So would calling climate change “the climate crisis” make a difference? That’s the contention of cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who was featured on one NPR segment. Lakoff says people think of the “climate” as something positive. And “change” is not bad. “Global warming?” Maybe that’s an even worse term, Lakoff tells host Guy Raz…

Read on: http://invw.org/2010/02/whats-in-a-name-when-the-issue-is-climate-change-plenty-linguist-says/

This Satellite Could Help Save Humanity

Carey — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:16:44 +0000

But DSCOVR remains grounded. That fact is key to interpreting the so-called ‘climategate’ emails.

by Mitchell Anderson | TheTyee.ca | January 20, 2010

NASA's stalled Deep Space Climate Observatory (artist's rendering).

The media missed the real story about the so-called “climategate” scandal.

After thousands of emails were mysteriously stolen from the University of East Anglia and distributed just before the climate conference in Copenhagen, many news outlets seemed content to report the story as it was presented to them rather than bothering to read the emails in the context they were written.

A closer look at these candid messages reveals a very different problem than the supposed scientific conspiracy theory that’s been in high rotation in the media. This previously unreported story also shows why launching the long-mothballed Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) is more urgent now than ever.

Read on: http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2010/01/20/DSCOVRSatellite/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=200110

2009 Media Follies!

Carey — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:54:01 +0000

Welcome to this 14th annual selection of a few of the year’s most over-hyped and underreported stories. With the news business, especially newspapers, undergoing a not-very-slow collapse (R.I.P. Post-Intelligencer), and hard news coverage usually the first victim of tightening budgets, there was more underreported news than ever this year. Fear not, however. America’s addiction to trivial distractions can withstand any assault from economic hardship–or from reality.

Read on: http://eatthestate.org/14-08/2009MediaFollies.htm

Nicholas Kristof’s Advice for Saving the World

Carey — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:08:30 +0000

What would happen if aid organizations and other philanthropists embraced the dark arts of marketing spin and psychological persuasion used on Madison Avenue? We’d save millions more lives.

By Nicholas D. Kristof | Outside Online | December 2009

The author reporting in the Democratic Republic of Congo (courtesy of Everett Collection)

In 2004, I visited the Darfur area three times, trying to bear witness to the slaughter of children and the burning of villages. I stepped over the desiccated carcasses of camels and goats to interview survivors still in hiding. I interviewed people who had seen men pulled off buses and killed because of their tribe and skin color, and I spoke to teenage girls who had been taunted with racial epithets against blacks while being gang-raped by the Sudanese-sponsored Arab militia, the janjaweed.

I was enraged by what I found and, as a New York Times columnist, wrote time and again about these atrocities on the op-ed page. Yet at first the public reaction seemed to be a collective shrug: Too bad, but isn’t that what Africa is always like? People slaughtering each other? Anyway, we have our own problems.

Read on: http://outside.away.com/outside/culture/200912/nicholas-kristof-philanthropy-advice-1.html?utm_source=Outside&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Dispatch