The Union of Concerned Scientists
combed six months of Fox News broadcasting and a year's worth of
Wall Street Journal editorial pages for mentions of the science of "climate change" and "global warming," then compared each claim to "mainstream scientific understanding" of the topic at hand.
"Everywhere I go, what I hear quoted back to me as scientific fact is often wrong," said Brenda Ekwurzel, a UCS staff scientist who presented the study to an audience gathered to discuss the state of climate communication with TIME environment editor Bryan Walsh and Harvard oceanographer James McCarthy. "That, to me, is so discouraging."
What's especially creepy about the study is how low the bar is for what constitutes "accurate." From the study:
Citations deemed to be misleading questioned either the reality of climate change or the fact that recent climate change is largely due human activities, or they advanced other arguments that dismissed established climate science.