Bob McCarty Writes

It should come as no surprise to folks who work in the print newspaper business that their industry is dying and the citizen journalism movement is growing exponentially.

It seems to me that excerpts from Steve Outing’s recent Editor & Publisher column, Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers, shape my argument better than my own words could have; therefore, I’m offering them below for your review:

• Indeed, newspapers’ fabled commitment to “objectivity” has been a detriment to efforts to combat global warming.

• There’s clearly scientific consensus that humans are altering the planet’s climate, and that the effect is accelerating.

• The few critics of the consensus are a small and shrinking group, who to most observers seem irrelevant. To the mainstream, they may as well be flat-earthers.

• As long as news organizations keep alive the idea that there’s still a “debate” about whether human-induced climate change is real or not, people have an excuse for not changing their behavior.

There you have it! Four of the many reasons why the print newspaper industry is dying and citizen journalism lives strong.

UPDATE: As noted in the post above, Outing stated in his article that “There’s clearly scientific consensus that humans are altering the planet’s climate, and that the effect is accelerating.” Now, only two days after his article ran in Editor & Publisher, I discovered this gem had surfaced from the office of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.):

Breaking: Less Than Half of all Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory

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