Anyone who?s followed the climate change debate will get a chuckle out of the opening of Andrew Ferguson?s latest column for Commentary:
It is always illuminating to note the occasions when the famous skepticism of the hard-boiled American journalist (?If your mother says she loves you, check it out!?) up and leaves him. Environmental reporters, to cite a common instance, will take the Wilderness Society at its word when it releases a report predicting ecological calamity at the hands of grasping capitalists; when a think tank backed by an oil company puts its own scientists on the case, the reporter smells a rat. Ideology often accounts for the disparate treatment, of course. If your mother says she loves you?well, it all depends on what kind of gal your mom is.
Ferguson notes that ideological bias is just one element in the ?gullibility? that leads media outlets to treat a ?bogus piece pf social science as news.? More important is ?the hunger for data, hard numbers, anything that can be called research, which will yield generalizations that can lift a straightforward news story onto the loftier plane of a cultural observation.?
