Graham Readfern writes in the Guardian:
Editors are obviously in a difficult position.
Moderating comments on stories takes time (I know this myself, after moderating more than 10,000 comments on an environment blog I used to write for News Ltd). Guardian columnist George Monbiot has written how companies specialise in creating fake online identities in order to target comment threads.
If a newspaper or other media outlet is publishing content which it knows is factually questionable or demonstrably wrong, does it have a responsibility to keep such pseudo-science statements off its pages?
While we ponder that, I’m off to check my horoscope – courtesy of the LA Times and hundreds of other mainstream newspapers around the world. Alternatively, I offer an excerpt from another “Letter to the Editor”, also printed in The Australian earlier this week:
“What’s the difference between a computer and a global warming denier? You only have to punch information into a computer once.” Chris Roylance, Paddington, Queensland
We should also not the Guardian article author is the same Graham Readfearn who’s been a contributor to Desmogblog since 2011 ( http://www.desmogblog.com/user/graham-readfearn?page=6 ), the web site built around an effort to portray skeptic climate scientists as crooks.
The elemental reason why Readfearn, Desmogblog, and any others (who’ve enslaved themselves to repeating the “skeptics are fossil fuel industry shills” mantra) don’t want ‘climate denier’ letters-to-the-editor published is because those letters eventually eventually end up mentioning detailed science-based climate assessments by skeptic scientists, which Readfearn and his crowd doesn’t want the public to know about, and which the various publications never bother to tell their readers about. That’s what prompts those letters to begin with, the sheer mainstream media malfeasance on not telling half the story of the science of global warming.
Chris Roylance is a serial idiot. Paddington is just a hop, skip and jump from where I live and I have frequently read his regular comments in newspapers both local and national here in Australia.. I’ve yet to find any redeeming features to his comments in which he mostly whinges.
His stupid offering above says it all.
The LA Times, our local lefty rags, and our TV stations, both local and national read stories from the wires without checking even the simplest content.
This blind faith in content providers that have proven themselves to be fast an loose with the facts or just mistaken, when it matches their agenda makes me question their “adherence to the truth”.
What “mountains of evidence” ?? Also, it’s not censorship when a newspaper does it, it’s “editing.”
It’s called “Noble cause corruption”, assuming that they are sincere about wanting to improve the world around them.
Liberals are full of contradictions, just like a teenager. They really never get the altruism that they claim they are full of. Their reasoning skills always boil down to one point – I’m in favor of whatever helps my cause today, if it hurts my cause tomorrow, i’ll be against it.
Take global warming, libs scream that we must act today or our children will have no future. Yet they are completely willing to toss the fiscal ticking time bomb down the road for their children to deal with, so they don’t have to feel the pain themselves. That’s great. According to them, it’s ok that our children live in a dark age (pun intended), as long as they can feel good about making a pointless attempt to “save the planet”.