Inhofe's media bias claim innacurate, bordering outright falsehood

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In his climate-change ain’t happening State of the Union speech of Sept. 25th, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) makes the claim that climate change “skeptic” scientists do not get a fair share of media coverage.

Inhofe states:

“Scientists like MIT‘s Richard Lindzen, former Colarado State Climatologist Roger Pielke, the University of Alabama’s Roy Spencer, and John Christy, Virginia State Climatologist Patrick Michaels, Colorado State University’s William Grey, atmospehric physicist Fred Singer, Willie Soon, Oregon State Climatologist George Taylor [and] astrophysicist Sallie Baliuna, just to name a few. But you never hear of them.The media never talks about these well-established scientists.”

We won’t get into the fact in this post that many of the “well established” scientists Inhofe rattles off are “well established” in the oil and coal industry.

Instead, we tested Inhofe’s claim that the scientists he lists are never  talked about in the media. Unfortunately, Inhofe’s claim of media bias is way off the mark.

A quick infomart media search of major  North American newspaper shows over 350 mentions of Fred Singer, Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, William Grey, Roger Pielke, Richard Linzen and Patrick Michaels. In other words, the most notorious climate change “skeptics” in the US have been mentioned, on average, once every 5 days in North American major print outlets alone.

 

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Kevin is a contributor and strategic adviser to DeSmogBlog.

He runs the digital marketing agency Spake Media House. Named a “Green Hero” by Rolling Stone Magazine and one of the “Top 50 Tweeters” on climate change and environment issues, Kevin has appeared in major news media outlets around the world for his work on digital campaigning.

Kevin has been involved in the public policy arena in both the United States and Canada for more than a decade. For five years he was the managing editor of DeSmogBlog.com. In this role, Kevin’s research into the “climate denial industry” and the right-wing think tank networks was featured in news media articles around the world. He is most well known for his ground-breaking research into David and Charles Koch’s massive financial investments in the Republican and tea party networks.

Kevin is the first person to be designated a “Certified Expert” on the political and community organizing platform NationBuilder.

Prior to DeSmogBlog, Kevin worked in various political and government roles. He was Senior Advisor to the Minister of State for Multiculturalism and a Special Assistant to the Minister of State for Asia Pacific, Foreign Affairs for the Government of Canada. Kevin also worked in various roles in the British Columbia provincial government in the Office of the Premier and the Ministry of Health.

In 2008 Kevin co-founded a groundbreaking new online election tool called Vote for Environment which was later nominated for a World Summit Award in recognition of the world’s best e-Content and innovative ICT applications.

Kevin moved to Washington, DC in 2010 where he worked for two years as the Director of Online Strategy for Greenpeace USA and has since returned to his hometown of Vancouver, Canada.

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