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Robert Muir's avatar

Fortunately I've been successful at getting some Canadian Broadcasting Corporation stories corrected on the topic of extreme rainfall trends and damages (https://www.cityfloodmap.com/2019/09/assessing-damage-cbc-ombudsman-finds.html, https://www.cityfloodmap.com/2020/11/radio-canada-ombudsman-finds-standards.html, https://www.cityfloodmap.com/2019/01/). Bravo to the CBC ombudsmen for helping to improve accuracy in journalism (and adhere to their own policies). Most recently the offending article was deleted as the ombudsman suggested it was so bad it was not salvageable (see description/ruling). Sadly, some journalists seem to start with a conclusion and work back to fill in the story - facts be damned!

Recently our local Toronto-area development newsletter Novae Res Urbis issued a correction to an earlier story that had led off saying southern Ontario rain intensities were increasing. The editor was quite supportive when I raised the issue of data in our Engineering Climate Datasets showing nothing of the sort. Its nice when folks are open minded and listen and make correction. These are the data trends I cited by the way: https://www.cityfloodmap.com/2023/05/southern-ontario-extreme-rainfall.html ... the original article author had offered nothing to back up the original statement that intensities were increasing which is typical (i.e., just cut and paste the narrative).

Another successful avenue I have found for corrections is working with Canada's advertising standards agency. While you can say whatever opinion you want in a newspaper, advertising must meet a higher standard to not mislead consumers. Again, after sharing information on actual extreme rain trends many large insurance companies have updated earlier inaccurate statements in their advertising. This effort took years. The result? Insurance companies no longer report that an arbitrary 1 standard deviation shift in a normal bell curve is the actual frequency shift data for extreme rainfall in Canada. Yes, for years leading news organizations across the country, and even the chief economist of a large bank, repeated that a 40 year storm had already become a 6 year storm in Canada - but this was all made up, a 1 std dev shift in bell curve shift!!!, and no data was never used or checked. The details on this "weather story" are here: https://www.cityfloodmap.com/2015/07/storm-intensity-not-increasing-old.html

It takes a lot of effort and patience to share data and to try and not be a 'pointed headed' engineer / scientist when communicating and helping journalists. Often one is just dismissed as wearing a tin foil hat though :) To get ahead of stories, instead of just following up, U of T's Dr. Bryan Karney and I prepared a report for CBC ombudsmen with data sources to share with editors/journalists and consider to improve the accuracy or balance in reporting. I hope this is helping.

As Steve Martin said, some people have a way with words and others ... ummm...'not have way'. Thanks Roger to you and your way with words, making these topics more digestible. Its a model for us all to follow and help the journalists out there up their game :)

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Pat Robinson's avatar

In my view, climate journalism is working exactly as its designed to do, supporting a narrative. And its a self correcting loop like all aspects of the censorship grift.

Only the most extreme hair on fire papers get cited, as you note, and so if people want to see their name in print they have to follow suit.

Eventually you don't even have to punish people for dissenting as they are all now pavlovs dog, doing exactly as they are trained to do in order to get that validation.

And this is why legacy media is dying a well deserved death, everything is advocacy over news but the real fraud is pretending its still news.

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