Clearly there is an organized effort by the Left to discredit Fox News’ “hard news” reporting credibility — most recently on global warming. Last week Media Matters and others criticized the network’s Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon, for a memo he sent to his reporters that told them to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.” In other words, telling them to objectively report the facts. The Leftosphere is in a tizzy.
Now comes a USA Today report about a survey conducted in November which found that “climate science doubts increase the more you watch Fox News:”
The survey results follow news this week from a leaked memo that a Fox News managing editor instructed reporters to note doubts about global temperature increases last year, and a University of Maryland study found that Fox News viewers were “significantly more likely” to believe falsehoods about the economy, political votes and climate science.
“The more Fox News you get, the less likely you are to trust scientists,” says Stanford public opinion expert Jon Krosnick. The November survey of 890 people found that, “more exposure to Fox News was associated with less endorsement of the views of mainstream scientists about global warming, and all of these relationships are statistically significant.”
Yes, this was a perfectly objective survey conducted by an otherwise disinterested public opinion expert at Stanford. Who did the project for the university’s Woods Institute for the Environment, whose mission is “Creating Practical Solutions for People and the Planet.” And Krosnik is is a university fellow at Resources for the Future. Who just so happened to conduct this survey in November, before news broke about the Sammon memo, which implies they were sitting on it as they did their polling and waited until now so they could release a barrage of publicity — in conjunction with other Leftist groups — for maximum impact. And as you see above, Krosnick cited the Sammon memo in his survey report.
All of which USA Today found not relevant to report.
Update 2:00 p.m: I should have known better than to run this post without first checking if Marc Morano at Climate Depot had anything on Krosnick or Woods Institute. He does:
Professor Krosnick’s polling results are so woeful that both Pew Research Center Survey and Gallup polling recently took the time to harshly reprimand him for his shoddy work.
Krosnick has been skewing polling results on global warming for years and has been getting caught every time.
And then there are the public opinion polls by Rasmussen that have shown increasing public skepticism on global warming — outnumbering alarmists.
