One really has to wonder just how far the American “news” media is willing to move away from the Principles of Journalism. In 1997, the Committee of Concerned Journalists of the Project for Excellence in Journalism outlined nine Principles of Journalism (below). Ten years after the formulation of these principles, it appears that every major American television news outlet, including CNN, has abandoned the nine core principles that are supposed to comprise the basis of objective journalism.

1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth
2. Its first loyalty is to citizens
3. Its essence is a discipline of verification
4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover
5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise
7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant
8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional
9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience

As I posted on this blog years ago, an October 2003 report by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the university of Maryland found that “a substantial portion of the (American) public had a number of misperceptions that were demonstrably false, or were at odds with the dominant view in the intelligence community.”

According to the PIPA study, which consumers of the mainstream “news” media who were polled showed the highest frequency of misperceptions regarding events related to the Iraq war? The chart shows that the inappropriately named “Fox News” clearly won the misperception contest. But you know until now, I had not paid that much attention how closely behind Fox all the other television news outlets and even the print media were in their race to promote misperceptions and to abandon the nine principles of journalism.

But now it seems that CNN has upped “the ante” in the race to be the most disingenuous television news outlet in America.

On May 2, 2007, CNN aired a disinformation program on global warming hosted by Glen Beck entitled Exposed: The Climate of Fear. Beck seems to be CNN’s answer to the ratings grabber and Ad hominen attack specialist Bill O’Reilly.

A new study from Indiana University found that Bill O’Reilly calls “a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.” The study shows that O’Reilly frequently employs multiple propagandist techniques that have been documented to have been in popular since after the end of World War I.

The May 2 CNN program brings back on to the stage a cadre of the well-known climate change deniers (many of whom are funded by Exxon Mobil and other industry powerhouses) as well as their tired arguments which have been thoroughly debated and debunked by scientists and the few remaining American news outlets that actually attempt to uphold the Principles of Journalism.

CNN promoted the program as being a vehicle to present the “other side of the climate debate that you don’t hear anywhere.” But in fact the program is rife with techniques that the climate deniers have been using ad naseum for decades including Ad hominen attacks on the deniers’ preferred high profile target, former Vice President Al Gore.

From Glen Beck, the man

• who claimed that the movie Happy Feet was a propaganda tool designed by a Hollywood director to indoctrinate children from being able to think for themselves about issues including global warming, and
• who uses the same name-calling techniques as does Bill O’Reilly,

one could not have expected anything more in this “television special” that purported to look “for answers and solutions about why Earth is warming and what man can do about it.”

But from CNN and Time Warner, outfits that claim to be “The Most Trusted Name in News” and offer “socially responsible programming” whose “actions must be guided by the highest standards of ethics”, one could and should expect a tremendous amount more.

It is time for American citizens to insist that CNN and many of the other once great and trusted American news media outlets change the direction of their race. To now move away from disingenuity and the promotion of misperception and distasteful discourse in the obvious quest for greater ratings. And to now move back to the objective Principles of Journalism.

Recently, what appears to be a corporate-funded, industry front group, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, has severely criticized Al Gore for his energy use. The “Report” from the group appears to have been well timed to have been released just after the film “An Inconvenient Truth” won two Oscars at this year’s Academy Awards.

It is easy to criticize. Certainly Al Gore is the biggest target both for people who don’t like him to begin with (remember the state of Tennessee voted against its own native son in the 2000 presidential elections) and for the naysayers and cynics determined to not take any action to stabilize the climate.

This is not to condone or condemn. Certainly it would be ideal if Mr. Gore’s houses, operations, and activities were “off the grid” and fossil fuels played no role in his activities. (Solar panels are now being installed at Gore’s home).
But let’s put things in perspective. In 2005, Americans used almost 100 Quadrillion British Thermal Units of energy.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0105.html

Here is a diagram of the historical energy use in the United States:

Energy Consumption by Source, 1635-2000 (Quadrillion Btu)

Note that most renewables (solar, wind, etc.) are such a small part of total consumption, they don’t even make it onto the chart!

The magnitude of fossil fuel energy use today is so huge that it is entirely possible for any one individual, company, or organization to become carbon neutral through offsets. One can think of this as paying a premium for one’s energy use to ensure that all of the energy one uses is replaced in the system by renewable sources of energy.

Some ski resorts in the northeast are becoming “carbon neutral” by ensuring that every bit of energy that they use to make artificial snow is “generated” by windmills. Do these ski resorts have windmills on-site? NO! But they pay a premium to ensure that every bit of energy that they consume locally is replaced on the national grid by energy generated by windmills thousands of miles away from their locations.
Here is an article:
http://www.boston.com/business/gl…..to_the_trail_of_environmentalism/
And her is a diagram showing how this works:
http://www.boston.com/business/gl…../articles/2007/01/26/making_snow/

The article in the Tennessean:
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pb…..le?AID=/20070227/NEWS01/702270382
did describe Al’s offsets briefly “$432 a month Gore paid extra for solar or other renewable energy sources”. It also stated : “The home’s average monthly electric bill last year was just under $1,200″ and “In addition to the electric bill, the natural gas bill for Gore’s home and guesthouse ran $1,080 per month last year.”. Using those numbers that is about $2280 per month in energy bills.

If, as the article says, Mr. Gore is paying $432 a month for energy offsets, that is equivalent to an 19% “carbon tax” that Al and Tipper are paying to be “carbon neutral.”

Should Mr. Gore’s energy tax be larger than 19%. Perhaps. But remember this number does not take into account other direct monetary contributions made by Mr. Gore towards energy offsets and conservation (including sales from his books and the film) nor does it take into account the offsets and new energy efficiencies now being put into place by individuals, corporations, and governments who have be inspired to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Of course the report by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research criticizing Mr. Gore never mentions the offsets.
http://www.tennesseepolicy.org/main/article.php?article_id=367

So just who is the “Tennessee Center for Policy Research” and this new Gore critic Drew Johnson, president of this center?

From its tax filings, it is pretty hard to figure out just what this center is about:
http://dynamodata.fdncenter.org/9…..amp;yr=200512&rt=990&t9=A

Apparently it is a relatively new group with its first 990 filling being for 2005. The form shows and annual funding of about $100K. But it is pretty weird in that no officers are listed. No employees are listed since the total paid in wages is $48K and the form only requires that employees earning more than $50K be identified (a coincidence?).

Well, we can find more information on the “Center’s” web page:
http://www.tennesseepolicy.org/main/article.php?article_id=89

“Prior to founding TCPR, he served as a policy analyst at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation where he authored “The Return of Fuzzy Math and Risky Schemes: How Presidential Hopefuls Would Deepen Deficits,” a major influence for the increased focus on government spending in the 2004 presidential election.In 2002, while at the American Enterprise Institute, Johnson’s research on the link between increased campaign finance regulation and rates of incumbent reelection served as the empirical backbone in the Supreme Court Case “McConnell v. FEC.” As a research analyst for the Modern Red Schoolhouse Institute in Nashville, he examined state educational standards, education reform and pedagogical use of technology.
A former Institute for Humane Studies Koch Fellow, Johnson recently completed his third term on the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth. He also sits on the Board of Directors of the Marketplace.MD Foundation. A native of Johnson City, Tennessee, Johnson holds a bachelors degree from Belmont University and a Master of Public Policy degree from Pepperdine University.”

Anybody see any red flags?

* The “National Taxpayers Union” has received funding from Philip Morris and the Tobacco Institute:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index……tional_Taxpayers_Union_Foundation
* The American Enterprise Institute is a know highly conservative think tank, receives funding from extreme conservative foundations such as the Scaife Foundations, and has received significant funding from Philip Morris and ExxonMobil.
AEI has on its staff conservative luminaries including Robert H. Bork, Lynne Cheney, Newt Gingrich, and Richard Perle.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index……tle=American_Enterprise_Institute
* The Institute for Humane Studies: “acts as a libertarian talent scout, identifying, developing, and supporting the brightest young libertarians it can find who are intent on a leveraged scholarly, or intellectual, career path… The Institute receives funding from a number of large libertarian and right-wing foundations, including the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Koch Family Foundations, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the Carthage Foundation.”
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index……itle=Institute_for_Humane_Studies
* The Koch Family Foundation “consist of the David H. Koch Foundation, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, and the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation… Funding for the foundations comes from the conglomerate Koch Industries, the ‘nation’s largest privately held energy company, with annual revenues of more than $25 billion. … Koch Industries is now the second largest family-owned business in the U.S., with annual sales of over $20 billion.’
‘The company is owned by two of the richest men in America,’ David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch (described as ‘reclusive billionaires’), who have a combined personal fortune estimated at more than $3 billion and who have emerged as major Republican contributors in recent years. … Both David and Charles Koch are ranked among the 50 richest people in the country by ‘Forbes’.
The foundations are financed via the oil and gas fortunes of Fred G. Koch, a founding member of the John Birch Society. David is a libertarian who ‘provides a significant amount of funding for the Cato Institute’s $4 million annual budget.’”
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_Family_Foundations

So we don’t know who exactly is funding the “Tennessee Center for Policy Research” or its President Drew Johnson. But Johnson sure does have significant ties to conservative groups and energy corporations. Is Johnson’s “Center” just another industry funded front-group?

All I can say is:
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone

Top aide to N.H. congressman resigns

Note: I originally published this synopsis to my website on December 2002 as part of a review of Webcredibility. (See http://www.nodvin.net/nodvin/webcredibility/ ). I am now teaching a seminar course on Critical Thinking and I decided to repost the original writing to this blog.

It is true that almost anyone can put up a web site even one that looks “informative”. However the unsuspecting viewer may not think question the purpose behind a professionally looking website which contains a lot of apparently relevant information. Doing a Google search on the words “side effects”, turns up as one of the top hits: Zoloft Side Effects Lawyer - suicide, withdrawal, agitation, aggression, hostility. This is the title embedded in the HTML code of the Zoloft Side Effects Lawyer website. The keywords embedded in the HTML are: zoloft, zoloft side effects, ssri, antidepressant, sertraline, side effects of zoloft, zoloft withdrawal, zoloft information, antidepressant side effects,zoloft withdrawal symptom, zoloft effects, zoloft lawsuit, zoloft antidepressant, zoloft sertraline, zoloft lawyer, zoloft attorney.

So it is a good bet that someone using almost any search engine for information on side effects of Zoloft and other antidepressants will hit upon this site.

The group, Consumer WebWatch, has proposed the following guidelines regarding Web credibility: (more…)

RawStory is reporting: “New Christian broadcasting TV special featuring Ann Coulter links Darwin to Hitler.”

“Author and Christian broadcaster Dr. D. James Kennedy connects the dots between Charles Darwin and Adolf Hitler in Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, a groundbreaking inquiry into Darwin’s chilling social impact,” announces a press release issued by Florida’s Coral Ridge Ministries.

According to the promotional materials for this “documentary”:

“In this groundbreaking documentary D. James Kennedy looks into Darwin’s chilling social impact — and the mounting evidence that Darwin had it wrong on the origin of life”.

Well “here they go again”. Since the anti-evolutionists have been unsuccessful in either disproving the theory of evolution or using pseudo-scientific ideas to bump it out of public school textbooks, they are now trying to find a way to make Evolution to be “Evil.”

Think about it. Since Einstein discovered the relationship between energy and matter, does that make him responsible for the deaths of the people in Hiroshima? That would be the logic used by the anti-evolutionists in their new screed “Darwin’s Deadly Legacy”.

As a professor of natural sciences, I often give a lecture on Eugenics to my college classes, subtitled: “How common misconceptions regarding evolution, genetics, and heredity led scientists astray”.

It is true that two American scientists, Charles Davenport, Ph.D. Biology, Harvard and Harry Laughlin, D.Sc. Cytology, Princeton created the American Eugenics Movement in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s which, did indeed, influence the Nazi movement.

But Davenport and Laughlin completely misinterpreted Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. These scientists gone wrong did huge damage. However, their eugenics ideas were not based upon science but upon their their pre-conceived biases and prejudices. These guys twisted Darwin’s findings to rationalize their pre-existing racist and xenophobic beliefs. (Sound familiar as to how today’s conservatives twist science to match their policies and beliefs?)

For more on the Eugenics movement in America see: http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/

For more on conservatives >30 year effort to replace the scientific-method with policy based on ideology read Chris Mooney’s book: The Republican War on Science.

The “talking-heads” on TV and radio are sure to be agog about this latest proclamation from the anti-evolutions. Since most Americans have little understanding of the real mechanisms of evolution, this latest stunt will likely get much traction.

As the Los Angeles Times reported on June 17, plagiarism is a huge problem in American educational systems. In the Times article, John Barrie head of iParadigms, a company that tracks digital information and assesses plagiarism states, “Students are using the Internet like an 8-billion-page, cut-and-pastable encyclopedia.” Barrie’s plagiarism analysis service, turnitin.com, evaluates 60,000 submissions a day. Barrie says his services finds that 30% of student papers are plagiarized, either totally or in part.

To those of us working in education who have used the turnitin service, the numbers are, unfortunately, not surprising. My experience is that students have learned in grade school, high school and college, that the Internet is a great resource for creating class presentations in PowerPoint or for making posters. The idea of actually citing the source of the materials used in the students’ slide or poster presentations is rarely an issue either for the students or the teachers.

This practice of cutting-and-pasting images and ideas does not seem alarming in a slide or poster presentation. However, when 70-90% or more of the text of a term paper can be documented by the turnitin service to have been copied word-for-word and without attribution from others’ works, Houston, we have a problem.

Students who have committed academic dishonesty have insisted to me that they have NOT plagiarized. First, these techniques were always rewarded for them in the past and never identified as cheating or plagiarism and, second, by having entered some of their own words into the paper, they honesty believe that they have avoided the practice of plagiarism.

Many of us in academic and educational institutions that we are going to have to put much more effort into teaching students about plagiarism: what it is and how to avoid it through proper paraphrasing and citation techniques.

Our job is made harder when literary thieves like Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and now Anne Coulter ply their journalistic trade by stealing others’ words.

In the video below (from Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show COUNTDOWN), John Barrie documents that Coulter’s work is “textbook plagiarism.”

The Dixie Chicks strike a blow against the hatred and xenophobia that pervaded the U.S. for too many years now.

On Sunday, Feb. 19, at 7 p.m. ET/PT, the CBS News Magazine 60 Minutes will highlight a segment on the consequences of global warming. In the segment, Bob Corell, one of the world’s foremost authorities on climate change states, “The oceans in the Northern Hemisphere are the warmest they’ve been on record.” (more…)

Laurie Goodman graciously allowed the posting of her writings regarding Intelligent Design on this blog:

The controversy surrounding Intelligent Design is front and center in the news these days, and nothing could make its proponents any happier. (more…)

On the day that the New York Times (finally) reported that President Bush essentially suspended the Fourth Amendment in 2002, a bipartisan group of Senators have blocked the reauthorization of the Patriot Act.
Raw Story reports that the New York Times withheld this important story on domestic spying from the American public for a full year.

The filibuster was led by Senators Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin, and Larry Craig, R-Idaho. The cloture vote failed by an amazing 47 Nays to 52 Yeas (60 votes are needed for cloture to end debate in the Senate).

Although the Main Stream Media seems not to have caught on this filibuster by Feingold et al. is an important event for American history.

Four years ago Feingold distinguished himself as the Senate’s leading defender of the Constitution, when he became the sole member of that body to vote against enactment of the Patriot Act. Senator Feingold was also only one of 23 Senators who voted in 2002 against giving Bush authority to start the war in Iraq. (Democratic Senators who voted FOR the war included Biden, Clinton, Edwards, Feinstein, Kerry, Reid, and Schumer). And Four years ago, Feingold distinguished himself as the Senate’s leading defender of the Constitution, when he became the sole member of that body to vote against enactment of the Patriot Act.

Now, by preventing cloture on this Bill, 47 Senators have stood up to President Bush to let him know that they they believe in the importance of the rights granted to citizens by the U.S. Constitution. The Patriot Act and Bush’s secret presidential orders have abridged those rights.

The Senate had passed a compromise version of the Patriot Act renewal that was reasonable. But conservatives in the Senate-House conference committee rejected the compromise. To show you how bad the filibustered Reauthorization Bill was, even Senator John Sununu (with whom I almost never agree with) blasted the bill yesterday.

Unless Congress quickly pulls off some sort of extension, the Patriot Act provisions that will expire on December 31 can be found here.