Other than most facts in the story were wrong, it was a fine news report. Not.
Both the AFP and Reuters have withdrawn/retracted the story claiming 100,000 children were in immigration detention due to Trump Administration policies because the data, which didn’t mean what they thought it meant, was from 2015, during a different president’s administration.
Perennial fictional news reporter CNBC tops them all in an article about the shortage of epinephrine auto-injectors (also known by the brand name Epi-Pen).
They illustrate the article with a photo of a child being injected with insulin in the arm – but falsely label it as a child receiving an EpiPen injection. Epinephrine auto injectors are used on the thigh muscle, not the arm.
CNBC made a reckless and dangerous error that could be life threatening by training the public to misuse an EpiPen. The original photo they used was clearly labeled as an insulin injection but CNBC intentionally and false changed it to say it is an EpiPen injection.
Click on the title to read more …
Time Magazine engaged in deliberate, and false, propaganda messaging to influence readers to take action. After contacting the magazine, they did, at least, revise the headline (for the 3rd time). They began with the accurate headline “How Asthma Inhalers are Contributing to Climate Change” but immediately changed it and promoted this rude and 100% false headline: “How Asthma Inhalers are Choking the Planet”.
First, making crude humor of asthmatics “choking” is not funny and is rude and insensitive. Second, it is physically impossible for inhalers to be “choking the planet”. In homes where someone uses an inhaler, annual inhaler usage produces about 1% of the total CO2-equivalent gases emitted by the home and life activities during the course of a year. If all inhalers were eliminated tomorrow, there would be no measurable impact on weather or climate over the next 100 years. A worst case inhaler, using data cited by Time and BMJ, produces about half the CO2-equivalent GHC as does a person breathing and exhaling CO2. Seriously. Just breathing is a bigger threat than using inhalers.
Time eventually changed the headline to the better, but still misleading “How One Commonly Used Asthma Inhaler is Damaging the Planet”. Their fiction story also referenced the wrong gas used as a propellant, cited an exaggerated greenhouse gas effect multiplier from an environmental activist group rather than the more modest IPCC AR5 science-based estimate, and then omitted many article changes from their Corrections List. The text itself continues to climate shame asthmatics with the false “Choking the Planet” claim.
This is an example of garbage journalism and how not to do do climate communications.
The claim that “1 in 4 Americans defaulted on their student loans” is a misleading headline from CBS News. The actual number is less than 1 in 20 Americans defaulted – and this was narrowly during the period of The Great Recession, the worst economic collapse since The Great Depression. They have worded the headline to use the method of “anchoring” – when we see this, we immediately think “1 in 4 Americans” have defaulted, which is not true. This appears to be propaganda in support of wiping out student debts.
Healthy able-bodied activists climate shaming asthmatics for their use of life saving medication is not a successful propaganda strategy. From a survey of social media, this story has produced a high level of outrage.
The Guardian announces that it requires their staff to use pejorative propaganda terminology rather than the facts of atmospheric CO2 levels rising, sea level ice and temperature changes, ice mass changes and so on. Anyone who does not 100% adopt The Guardian’s perspective is to be labeled a “denier” (name calling, transference from “Holocaust denier”, get on the bandwagon). The word “climate” should be associated with “crisis”, “emergency” or “heating” (transference, fear). Shrill terminology designed to inflame and create emotional outrage is a turn off and causes readers to tune out from the issues.
This is how fake news service Newsweek reported on the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize today. Seriously. They did not write a single headline report on the actual winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps this is because Thunberg is white and Prime Minister Ahmed is black and Newsweek is racist?
We live among the best of times in world history yet even positive economic news, as in this article, are all translated into negatives. Journalism focuses on negativity, causing anxiety and a culture of outrage where everyone is upset all the time. The linked article is an amazing example showing how the news was deliberately spun into negatives; each item listed is then rewritten in the positive, dramatically improving the emotions of the reader.
I am so old I remember that just yesterday the media said it was wrong and hurtful for adults to question the background of a 16 year old… talk about inconsistency!
News focused on the negative, is overly dramatic, leads us to false conclusions about the world and is largely pointless speculation, fear and dlick-bait headlines designed primarily to attract eyeballs to advertisers. News is also largely a waste of our time, says Psychology Today.