This edited extract of Getting Murdoched: How Murdoch’s Media Wields Power and Punishment Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson examines Murdoch’s destructive anti-climate change campaign.

The emergence of climate change as a global issue coincided with the creation of Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire. Except for a brief period when his younger son, James, persuaded him of the dangers of global warming and the need to give the ‘planet the benefit of the doubt’, Murdoch was at best sceptical, at worst hostile to the issue.

Depending on the individual economic circumstances of the three main countries he operates in, Murdoch’s outlets have overwhelmingly either campaigned against the need to combat climate change and given free rein to climate sceptics no matter how outlandish their claims, or raised objections to any plans for shifting to renewable energy sources, disproportionately focusing on any problems and avoiding discussing the benefits of solutions.

They have mauled governments working to act on climate change and lavished editorial support on those that have opposed or run dead on it. They have worked with and supported the array of fossil fuel industry-backed denialist ‘experts’, think tanks and politicians, providing them with ample space on their opinion pages and time on their shows on Fox. Roger Ailes, the founding head of Fox News, who publicly preached the network’s ‘fair and balanced’ slogan, privately viewed climate change as a ‘worldwide conspiracy’ created by ‘foreign nations’ to win control of America’s resources. In short, they have sown doubt and reaped fear.

The tragedy surrounding climate change in Australia, for example, is that many years were lost to political fighting aggravated and amplified by Murdoch media noise, with their unparalleled reach in the local print media market. The net zero emissions target is significantly harder to achieve now in Australia and will impose a greater economic cost. If the carbon emissions trading scheme introduced by the Labor government in 2012 had been allowed to continue, the nation would have been well on the way to achieving its international targets. But it was killed off by the Liberal–National Coalition government in 2014, with a lot of help from News’ outlets.

For climate experts, the science was basically settled many years ago but for those associated with the fossil fuel industries and the US Republican Party, it was a different story. Once ‘the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly’, wrote Republican strategist Frank Luntz in a leaked 2002 memo, advocating an all-out attack: ‘You need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.’

The anti-climate change campaign was aided by an inherent weakness in the method of journalism and abetted by Murdoch’s media outlets. The need in daily journalism to find balance by reporting both sides of an issue is easily exploited. For every climate sceptic there were 100 climate scientists, but a journalist following the ‘he said, she said’ dictum would quote only one of each. Balance seems to have been served, but the actual weight of evidence is seriously distorted.

As journalist and academic David McKnight wrote: ‘In this “balanced” framework, scientific findings would appear controversial, since the premise of the debate was politics: the sub-text was that support or opposition to climate science was a matter of political belief.’

Embedded in the words political belief were two strategies. The first was to drag climate science away from science – with its well-established protocols for evidence, proof and peer review – to politics, which is open to endless........

© Pearls and Irritations