Suspicion of the messenger. . .

Who says it is just as important as what is said.  We all know that.  In the world there are certain folks who have authority not of office elected nor of appointment but simply by virtue of their stature.  When Warren Buffet speaks on business or the economy, people pay attention.  Even in a congregation there are non-elected people who can sway the opinion and vote of others.  The media decided that when Trump spoke, it was a lie and so everything he said was suspicious.  Biden says the same thing and there is no inherent suspicion.  It is not the content but the speaker that changes how things are heard.

For some time now the media has become the voice of science and medicine and morality.  Instead of simply reporting the facts, the media has insisted upon coloring those facts according to a political and ideological bias.  Everyone knows this except the media, it seems.  They sit in their ivory towers at NBC, Fox, CNN, etc., and presume that the world looks at them with respect -- so much respect that they take what they say as truth.  But that is the problem.  The media have less credibility than hawkers of used cars or today's TV special value.  That means that we are as a nation suspicious of what we hear even when what is spoken is fact.

The media has taken on certain causes as their pet projects and climate change is one of them.  It would seem that every one of them had to read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in high school and from then on have only read what accords with her view of the coming destiny to the planet.  Anyone who deviates from the sacred truth of climate change is either a fool or a lunatic or a Trumper and none of them have any credibility in the media.

So it was interesting that I read (in the New York Times no less) that the chief scientist in the Obama administration’s Energy Department (and a professor of physics at Cal Tech) wrote a book that challenges the gospel according to Al Gore, the inventor of the internet.  He has the real science to suggest that while climate change is real, just about everything we have been told about it is not. 

In his book,  Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, Steven E. Koonin puts the science against the claims of the media that have dominated our thinking and driven our policies for many years.  He writes:

tornado frequency and severity are . . . not trending up; nor are the number and severity of droughts. The extent of global fires has been trending significantly down. The rate of sea-level rise has not accelerated. Global crop yields are rising, not falling. And while global CO2 levels are obviously higher now than two centuries ago, they’re not at any record planetary high—they’re at a low that has only been seen once before in the past 500 million years.

and

Heat waves in the U.S. are now no more common than they were in 1900 . . . the warmest temperatures in the U.S. have not risen in the past 50 years. . . . Humans have had no detectible impact on hurricanes over the past century. . . . Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was 80 years ago . . . The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.

You can read him for yourself.  He has the credentials and data to make his claims.  But this is not about him.  It is about how media can color how we see things -- this is just as important as whether or not they are true.  So, for example, the whole coverage of the pandemic has presumed that science is saying one thing when science is saying many things but the media chose what to report and challenges every other viewpoint.  The media thinks it is being objective but it is arbitrarily choosing sides for us and then telling us what supports this side while debunking every other voice that challenges this side.  Is it no wonder we are not what to think about masks, social distancing, shutting down businesses and churches, vaccines, and the like?  We are not given facts as much as we have been given the story that the media wants to tell.  I have every confidence that some of what they say is true but how is the person listening to the radio, watching TV, reading papers, or perusing the internet supposed to know fact facts from uncertain facts -- or worse, whether the conclusions drawn from the facts are reliable, credible, and trustworthy?

When climate science or pandemic policy or religious claims are colored by blindness to fact and truth, how is anyone supposed to know what to believe?  When climate change cannot stand up to real debate, is it truth?  When pandemic policy cannot stand up to opposing opinions and facts, what are we to think and do?  When the media has decided that skeptics are the only true voices of Christianity, is it no wonder that the Church is bleeding off members?  I am very certain that God can stand up to His critics and He does not need us to defend Him -- only to speak the truth in love!  I am quite confident that whatever is true about climate change can stand up to a real debate and all we need are facts and the disputing voices interpreting those facts -- not someone to think for us.  I am sure that after a year of information that is sometimes contradictory and sometimes incoherent, most of us will do the right thing if we are given real facts and a real debate of substance on what those facts mean.

But my point is that the media will not do this.  Our politicians will not do this.  And so we will continue to be hesitant about what and who to believe and instead choose to listen only to those who say what we think.  The messenger can make the message and they can kill it, too.