Most media outlets rely on The Associated Press type guide—officially known as the AP Stylebook—as the arbitrator for grammar, spelling, and nomenclature in news coverage. While AP’s style guide is intended to serve as an impartial guide for good coverage, its guidelines frequently forbid conservative viewpoints.
Consider AP’s latest round of changes, released Friday. The updates include guidance on how to avoid” stigmatizing” obese people, admonitions to avoid calling people “homeless” as it might be “dehumanizing”, and warnings to avoid the term “female” since” some people object to its use as a descriptor for women because it can be seen as emphasizing biology and reproductive capacity over gender identity”.
AP’s style manual prefers “anti- pregnancy” and “abortion- rights” as adjectives, urging journalists to evade “pro- living”, “pro- choice”, and “pro- abortion”.
Yet one of the largest sections of the updated style manual involves” weather change”, a word that AP says” can be used colloquially” with the phrase” climate crisis”.
” Climate change, resulting in the climate crisis, is mainly caused by human activities that emit carbon dioxide, methane and another greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, according to the vast majority of friend- reviewed studies, research organizations and weather scientists”, the AP style guide intones. ” This happens from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, and another activities”.
” Greenhouse gases are the main drivers of culture change”, the manual adds.
The style manual urges reporters to “avoid fake balance,” presenting unsupported claims or incompetent sources under the guise of balancing a story by including all views, with the money T. For instance, coverage of a study that discusses the effects of climate change does not need to ask for” the other side’s claim that people do not have any effect on the weather.”
Obviously, this is a dark fish. Those who question the climate-aggravist narrative do n’t hold the claim that “humans have no influence on the climate.” Instead, we claim that attempts to predict future events based on various weather alarm models have repeatedly failed and that the immediate effects of human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels, are poorly understood.
In the 1970s, climatologists warned of a coming ice age. In the 1990s, the form of the battleship would be world climate. The alarmists have now adopted the catch-all phrase” climate change,” allowing them to posthumously attribute human agency to any crisis that might strike us at the time.
It’s very smart, if you want a eternal fear- peddling tactic. The rest of us, who want cheaper power and want to address the humanitarian crises of extreme poverty in different parts of the world, are naturally somewhat uncomfortable with the narrative.
In fact, The Associated Press admits that there is no smoking-gun evidence that human activities are causing Armageddon.
The style guide advises against putting any single event on the list of causes of climate change until scientists have established a connection. Stories about individual events should also make it clear that they take place in a larger context.
AP’s willingness to completely write off the “other side” proves particularly instructive, considering the style guide’s claim that climate change affects many other issues.
” The climate story goes beyond extreme weather and science”, the Stylebook notes. ” It also is about politics, human rights, inequality, international law, biodiversity, society and culture, and many other issues. The impact of the climate crisis is seen in numerous areas of life thanks to successful climate and environment stories.
If journalists can throw out any pretense of objectivity on climate, and insist that climate change impacts all other social issues, can they also safely dismiss the obligation to cover “both sides” on politics, inequality, society, and culture? How does AP hope to stop this rot from spreading to other subjects and stop fair coverage entirely?
The prognosis is not good. The organization has repeatedly used its thumb on the scale to silence criticism of gender ideology and abortion, even going so far as to advise journalists against using the term” transgenderism” because it “frames transgender identity as an ideology.”
Even while urging journalists to avoid using the terms” climate change deniers” and” climate change skeptics”, the AP style guide suggests a more” specific” alternative, such as “people who do not agree with mainstream science that says the climate is changing” or “people who disagree with the severity of climate change projected by scientists”. Talk about” stigmatizing”.
According to AP, 97 % of scientists do n’t actually believe the world is going to end because we burn fossil fuels, which is a lie. This is consistent with the claimed unanimity of scientists on man-made catastrophic climate change.
The study assumed that the study had just peer-reviewed research papers to be able to arrive at that conclusion, categorizing them into seven categories, before artificially claiming that the majority of the papers favoring the alarmist viewpoint. Many researchers have claimed that the study inaccurately represented their research.
The precise effects of greenhouse gases are still undetermined, primarily because the global atmosphere is extremely complicated. The majority of climate models are unable to foretell what will actually happen. The science may be less well-established than AP would have led some journalists to believe, but lowering carbon emissions might help the climate.
If news coverage ignores any suspicions of an alarmist theory, it will skew the information ecosystem and discourage the precise scientific research that helps to discover the precise effects greenhouse gases have on the environment. It may also cause sceptical Americans to completely reject climate science, in the same way that the medical establishment wasted a lot of its public sway by stifling concerns during the COVID- 19 pandemic.
So why does The Associated Press give the scale its vote? The style guide’s creators may legitimately believe that there is only one viewpoint, but they also have a strong economic justification for doing so.
AP has received large grants from left- wing foundations, particularly for its climate reporting.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation spent$ 2.5 million on AP’s climate and education reporting, the Washington Free Beacon reported. That foundation also funds Planned Parenthood.
In 2021, the Rockefeller Foundation granted AP a$ 750, 000 grant to investigate” the increased and urgent need for reliable, renewable electricity in underserved communities worldwide.”
The KR Foundation, a Danish nonprofit that seeks the “rapid phase- out of fossil fuels”, gave approximately$ 300, 000 to The Associated Press in December 2022, but AP appeared to hide that donation until late last year.
Even with these funds, AP may continue to promote climate alarmism because the most recent style guide features left-wing groupthink on a number of issues, but the money provides an additional incentive.
The AP’s increasingly left-leaning approach and its attempt to force its style guide through creates a somewhat hostile environment for good science, let alone real journalism.
