Download the eBook (8.25 MB) - ECREA Thematic Sections

Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
balance. One of them states that “Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner has
accused the scientists involved in this affair or “suppression, manipulation, excessive
secrecy and service to an ideology”. But this position is “balanced” with the quote of an
opposing testimony by Jane Lubchenko, director of the National Oceanic and
Atmosferic Administration (NOAA): “The intercepted emails do not deny, and do not
even talk about the independent measurement by NOAA and NASA, which show a
dramatic rise of the temperatures in the last few decades” 47 .
Both articles exemplify the way El Mundo covered the Climategate affair, giving both
points of view roughly the same space and relevance, with no contextual information
which may help the reader to evaluate the relative weight within the scientific
community, therefore transmitting the idea that both positions are equally legitimate as
sources of knowledge on the topic.
The position of this newspaper on the existence of anthropogenic CC also seems to be
“balanced”, since opposing opinions are included. On December 9 th , El Mundo
publishes an article signed by former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who supports
the idea that the Climategate affair is irrelevant:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gets together more than 4000
scientists from all over the world. Their last report has accentuated, not diminished, the
enormous and diverse corpus of evidence on climate change due to human activities.
Its historical relevance can not be ignored as a consequence of the robbery of a
handful of e-mails from a university research centre. On the contrary, the harmful
antiscientific reaction that these e-mails have generated shows what is at stake 48 .
In the same page, George Will, columnist of The Washington Post, supports the
opposite position, in an article that ignores the scientific consensus on this topic, and
includes several pseudoscientific arguments:
Those who are sceptics about (..) climate change are so because climate change is
constant: since millenniums before the Medieval Warm Period (800 to 1.300), during all
the small Ice Age (1500 to 1800), and along millenniums since then, climate change
has always been a certainty that nobody argues. Sceptics doubt that the scientific
47 “El congresista republicano James Sensenbrenner ha acusado a los científicos implicados de «supresión,
manipulación, secretismo y servicio a una ideología. (...). En defensa de Holdren, durante una sesión especialmente
caldeada sobre el cambioclimático celebrada esta semana, salió la directora de la Administración Nacional Oceánica
y Atmosférica (NOAA), Jane Lubchenco. «Los ‘e-mails’ interceptados no niegan, y ni siquiera tratan sobre las
mediciones independientes de la NOAA y de la NASA que demuestran un dramático aumento de las temperaturas
en las últimas décadas», señaló Lubchenco”. El Mundo, 6-12-2009, p. 39.
48 “El Panel Intergubernamental sobre el Cambio Climático reúne a más de 4.000 científicos de todos los rincones
del mundo. Su último trabajo ha acentuado, no disminuido, el enorme y diverso corpus de evidencias del
calentamiento global debido a la acción humana. Su importancia histórica no puede ignorarse por el robo de un
puñado de e-mails de un centro de investigación universitario. Por el contrario, la dañina reacción anticientífica que
han desatado los correos electrónicos ha puesto de manifiesto lo que nos estamos jugando”. El Mundo, 9-12-2009,
p. 31.
191