Climate change activists have been an intolerant lot for a long time, but an AOC-aligned climate change group is taking matters one step further by telling news media outlets not to seek out and interview anyone who dares to disagree with them.
Margaret Klein Salamon, the founder and executive director of The Climate Mobilization, made her opinion clear when she told news outlets that they are literally sacrificing the future of the planet by allowing people who don’t believe in climate change to provide information for news articles. Unfortunately, Salamon is not the only person who thinks that “climate change deniers” should not be featured in articles alongside “scientific experts.” A few far-left professors and researchers have also weighed in, stating that allowing both sides to air their views creates a “false balance.”
There are two big problems with the demand to censor voices who don’t agree with the “man-made climate change emergency” narrative. The first is that news outlets are meant to be unbiased sources of information, not mouthpieces for politically correct organizations. Demanding that mainstream news media outlets become even more biased than they already are is dangerous.
Naturally, a news piece can and should include the credentials of the people who are providing opinions. If, as The Climate Mobilization claims, climate change deniers have thin credentials and climate change embraces have solid ones, the news will bear this out and people can decide what they will believe accordingly.
At the same time, many people who are questioning the man-made climate change emergency narrative are, in fact, experts in their fields. As a recent study in Nature Communications noted that more than two hundred “climate change contrarians” featured in recent news articles have at least one publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals. People with “thin credentials” don’t get to publish papers in prestigious scientific magazines, which means that the “climate change contrarians” aren’t as fringe as people like AOC might believe.
Salamon, on the other hand, is a psychologist and as such doesn’t really know more about the climate and how it works than the average American citizen. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who studied international relations and economics (wow…), likewise isn’t a climate expert. In fact, as her former chief of staff recently admitted, the Green New Deal originally had nothing to do with impending climate change doom. Rather, it was a blueprint for radically alternating the United States economy.
Progressives are always outraged when President Donald Trump criticizes the mainstream media for biased reporting. Ironically, they themselves are demanding that news media outlets become more biased in their coverage of climate change. The demand is made using supposedly altruistic motives, as climate activists state that the future of mankind is at stake. However, they fail to mention the fact that, if the “man-made climate change emergency” were genuine, it would stand on its own two feet no matter what people have to say against it.
