This week (mid-July, 2009) the Pew Research Center, an independent, non-partisan public opinion research organization that studies attitudes toward politics, the press and public policy issues, released the results of a particularly revealing survey having to do with global warming.
Their survey found that that 35% of the public believes that "scientists do not generally agree" that the earth is getting warmer because of human activity, BUT in reality 84% of scientists agree that human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, are primarily what’s causing the Earth’s surface temperature to rise.
What might be the cause of such a huge disparity between public perception and fact? Vested interests, that’s what. Lobbyists, politicians, pundits, and radio/TV show hosts who have an ideological or financial motivation to manipulate the public into believing what they want them to believe. The big integrity deficit on the parts of these public opinion influencers: the delusion that the ends justify the means. They don’t.
If the "liberal media" dominated the mainstream media as much as those who bash the mainstream media claim, the gap between these two sets of statistics would be nowhere near as wide as it is.
Citizen beware: what you think is fact is probably spin!
For more on how to further incoluate yourself against being manipulated by spin, read my "Three Secrets to Becoming a Spin-Buster" post on my IntegrityWatch Blog. To go further, type "spin-busting" into the internal search engine for the www.TheNewIQ.com — it’s in the upper right corner of each page on the site. You can also go directly to it using this link: www.TheNewIQ.com/search
