We juxtapose 386 prominent contrarians with 386 expert scientists by tracking their digital footprints across ∼200,000 research publications and ∼100,000 English-language digital and print media articles on climate change. Projecting these individuals across the same backdrop facilitates quantifying disparities in media visibility and scientific authority, and identifying organization patterns within their association networks. Here we show via direct comparison that contrarians are featured in 49% more media articles than scientists. Yet when comparing visibility in mainstream media sources only, we observe just a 1% excess visibility, which objectively demonstrates the crowding out of professional mainstream sources by the proliferation of new media sources, many of which contribute to the production and consumption of climate change disinformation at scale. These results demonstrate why climate scientists should increasingly exert their authority in scientific and public discourse, and why professional journalists and editors should adjust the disproportionate attention given to contrarians.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09959-4
New media organisations feature climate science deniers more than climate scientists, while the mainstream media promotes “false balance”, according to a new study published today in Nature Communications.
The authors examined some 100,000 English-language media articles relating to climate change for how often they mentioned a hand-picked group of 386 scientists and 386 contrarians.
The mainstream media is regularly accused of ‘false balance’ — where a climate science denier is invited to ‘balance’ the debate, despite the fact that rising temperatures driven by human-caused emissions is not scientifically disputed. But the study finds that across a sample of mainstream and new media, non-experts are actually given more visibility than experts
-> AGW-ontkenners krijgen meer aandacht in de nieuwe media dan klimaatwetenschappers.