Slashdot Mirror
Rupert Murdoch Buys National Geographic Magazine
dywolf writes: In a move that has inspired "dread" among the publication's journalists, as well as long time readers, Rupert Murdoch has just bought a controlling interest in all of National Geographic's media properties. The move turns the long time non-profit into a for-profit media corporation in the process. Some commenters have pointed to Murdoch's previous collaboration with the National Geographic Society, the NatGeo TV channel, as well other once respected publications he has bought such as the Wall Street Journal, as an example of what to expect, and to explain their apprehension at the deal.
This raises a question for reader KatchooNJ: As many of you likely know, Rupert Murdoch has famously not been quiet about his denial of climate change. National Geographic gives grants to scientists... so, is anything going to now change with the focus of National Geographic's organization?
"In a move that has inspired "dread" among the publication's journalists, as well as long time readers, Rupert Murdoch has just bought a controlling interest in all of National Geographic's media properties."
Read this portion and knew that I had read all I needed to. A shame as I have subscribed to the magazine for quite some time.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
This is just a continuation of the consolidation of media outlets into the hands of the few. Not really surprising. Real journalism is almost dead in the 21st century anyway.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
How about the continued and extended monopolization and control of media? I find that much more disturbing, and would ask that the people petition the government to break up the monopolies.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
One only needs to watch the drek on the National Geographic channel -- an endless parade of shockumentaries and "reality" TV -- to see the lowest common denominator at which Rupert Murdoch is aiming. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we can also expect as the future of National Geographic Magazine. Loads of articles intended to shock, articles on the latest travels of the celebrities du jour, plenty of paid product placements, and precisely no actual science.
Mourn for National Geographic magazine, ladies and gents, because it just died and the corpse will now be reanimated.
Can someone verify this? I read somewhere last night (can't find the link) that he only bought the media portion of NatGeo. The non-profit part that runs the museum in DC and gives out research grants is still under the control of the NatGeo non-profit. They basically sold the media segment so that they could still continue operating as a research non-profit. But I could be wrong.
I grew up combing through my dad's huge collection of issues, reading and discussing the articles with my dad and pouring over the incredible maps that came with many issues. National Geographic atlases, in particular The Earth and Man, were a dear part of my childhood. That I am a geography teacher today is directly related to my love of maps and the world around me. And now I have to mourn the passing of a loved and respected pillar of learning. Climate change denial and preppers are all that await now.
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
people are worried about this buyout and its usually because Murdoch owned fox news and the Wallstreet Journal slid hard right when they were bought by him,but i think its important to put this in perspective. hes a businessman.
Ive seen upcoming articles, and they look promising. "Gazelles, harbingers of homosexual war on christmas" seems to tackle a subject in a fair and balanced manner. "Penguins, natures undercover abortion factories" and "pot smoking illegal immigrant peregrine falcon migrations" might sound a bit heavy handed but the cover art is very dynamic.
Good people go to bed earlier.
...will all the topless native women be on page 3 now?
When the WSJ was sold the bias of the paper shifted not-so-subtly to the right. It may be a top-tier newspaper, but its bias clearly indicates it is a tool of the Murdoch empire.
Comparing the WSJ to the Washington Post probably is appropriate since the Washington Post shares the right wing bias.
The bottom line is that he owns way too many media outlets which tends to drown out other voices. The argument that any of his media outlets are truly independent is really a joke. They publish what he wants them to publish through direct, indirect, or implied influence. That is why the hate.
Why are journalists handing out grants to scientists (or anyone else) in the first place?
Because governments won't fund much science any more, and neither will for-profit corporations unless that science helps grow their profit in 1-2 years max, and neither will most people directly because they are too preoccupied with shiny, but people are willing to buy a shiny, intelligent magazine, and that magazine's (former) owners believed for more than 100 years that they should use those profits to fund science, so they did?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Yeah no kidding. People who believe that dinosaurs and humans lived side-by-side 6000 years ago have been cast out of the archaeology community too, as have people who believe the earth is flat from the geography community and people who believe the sun revolves around the earth from the astronomy community. Where did open-mindedness go?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Not voting for them is kind of the point of royalty...
Step 1) Show me a competent CLIMATE scientist that is arguing against anthropogenic climate change.
No, not biologists, economists, doctors, chemists, etc. PhDs are notorious for being utterly convinced of their own competence on things far outside their actual field of expertise. I want someone who has actually spent decades studying the intricacies of climate science.
Step 2) Get them to explain how steadily increasing the amount of infrared-scattering CO2 gas in the atmosphere, acting in a frequency band that's still fairly transparent (and distinct from the frequency band scattered by water vapor) can have any effect *other* than raising the average global temperature
Step 2B) - if they deny that humans are responsible for the rising CO2 levels, ask them how exactly they explain the fact that measured atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing at roughly 80% of the easily calculated rate that humans are releasing fossil carbon into the atmosphere, and what exactly they would expect to happen if we magically stopped our emissions tomorrow.
Step 3) Ask them to explain what's *actually* causing the *observed* increase in global temperatures over the last couple decades.
Do that, and then we can have a reasoned conversation on the topic. And it's a conversation I'd love to have, truly, because frankly things are looking pretty bleak, and the only contrarian voices I've heard have been from self-important crackpots and heavily vested interests (and their lab-coated puppets).
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The linked article is unfortunately abbreviated and incomplete, and as a result, the conclusions being drawn are wrong.
First off, the Society itself is still an independent non-profit. It just no longer has 100% ownership of the magazine. The effect on the Society is that it will have more money to give to scientists (while 21st Century Fox will have no say in how that money is handed out).
Second, they did not sell a controlling interest; the Society explicitly retains 50% of the Board of Directors for the magazine. The "73%" is Fox's share of profits, not control.
As I'm seeing discussion of this across the web, I'm starting to wonder how many people commenting have actually read National Geographic Magazine anytime in the last three decades. The level of science there has been steadily decreasing for a very long time - replaced slowly by adventure reporting not entirely unbiased "issue" reporting. On the other hand, the bias matches that of liberal/libertarian demographic that makes up a good part of the /. demographic, so it's probably been invisible to them. Which also explains why so many are mourning a mistaken image, rather than seeing it for the drek it has become. The science based National Geographic was bedridden by the 80's, comatose by the 90's, and has been on life support machines since the 00's.
Just like Discover, Scientific American, and Omni before it.
Why? Because real science is fucking boring, so boring that even those supposedly interested in it failed to notice it slipping away. It's no surprise to me that same demographic worships at the faux science altars of Mythbusters, Alton Brown, Bill Nye, and Niel DeGrasse Tyson - they want science, but only if it's tarted up, made entertaining, and reduced to sound bites they can pass around like cargo cultists. On Slashdot there's a constant refrain about the slipping position of science in American culture, and while it's often blamed on the conservatives and the Religious Right... Look to your mirrors and consider carefully the glass house in which you dwell.
And, as usual, the truth will be modded down - because it hurts.
Yeah, well Nat. Geo. TV is no gem. These are the same bozos who gave us Extreme Worm Wrangling (watch life and death struggles between he-boys and earth worms), Dangerous Minnow Fishing (he-boys bait and hook deathly minnows while they aren't looking), NASA: The Unexplained Files (UFOs are everywhere, Aliens buzz the Earth, no actual film of aliens, they are shy little devils...but we'll breathlessly tell what they COULD do were they to take out your brain for foosball practice), etc.
Murdoch and Nat. Geo. TV is a match made in Heaven.
Unless you're in Star Wars or high school.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Yes actively filtering information to determine what is true and what is not is a valuable skill on the internet and one that I use regularly, but that is only useful when you are trying to evaluate opinions on complex issues.
I will gladly sift through competing opinions to formulate my own opinion, but what I will not do is sift through bald faced lies to determine what is true and what is not just to get to the point of being able to form my own opinion. That is a waste of my time.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
In capitalist USA, fossils own National Geographic.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
First off, thank you for presenting a decent argument requiring me to bruch up on my understanding of some details. Now let me address at least some of your points.
-The bands get saturated...
Okay, that's true if you're trying to see images through the atmosphere at that wavelength, but is not really relevant to energy transfer. The IR in the relevant band is absorbed by the atmosphere BUT it's also immediately radiated in a random direction (half of it downwards) at the same frequency, aka scattering. 100% of the heat will eventually escape the atmosphere, it has to or the Earth would have been burnt to a cinder billions of years ago from trapped heat. The question is only how long it takes to do that. For simplicity think of the atmosphere as a bunch of layers of heavily frosted glass or semi-silvered mirrors reflecting heat, with every layer represents the thickness of atmosphere required to reflect 50% of the IR passing through it back at its source. And the Earth is at the bottom immediately re-radiating every photon that gets bounced back at it. Every photon that leaves the Earth will eventually escape the stack of mirrors, but essentially none of them will do so in a nice straight line (the straight path is saturated). Instead each one is going to bounce back and forth between mirrors at random until eventually it gets lucky and manages to make it through the topmost mirror. And the thing is, it doesn't matter how many layers there are, adding another one will always increase the total number of bounces required for a photon to escape (half the photons that would have escaped get bounced back downwards to wander randomly through the layers until they make it to the top again). And that's essentially what we're doing when we add CO2 to the atmosphere - we reduce the thickness of atmosphere required to reflect 50% of the heat, so that there's more atmosphere left over to act as a final mirror at the top of the stack (it probably won't be a full 50%, but the point is it will stop some of the photons from escaping immediately, increasing the average number of bounces required). And the whole time it's bouncing around it's contributing its energy to the atmosphere. Make it so that the photons take an average of 10% longer to escape to space, and you've increased their contribution to atmospheric temperature by a similar amount.
-CO2 is not only from humans.
You neatly ignore my point: measured atmospheric CO2 is increasing at *less than* the rates at which it is emitted by humans - logically if we stopped emitting fossil CO2 we could reasonably expect atmospheric CO2 levels to begin dropping.
As for alternate CO2 sources, that is true, however there are two distinct carbon cycles to consider. There's the short-term ecological carbon cycle that involves plants, animals, oceans, and the atmosphere. It shifts carbon around into some sort of equillibrium, but can fluctuate quite a bit - and our emissions are admittedly tiny on that scale, only a few percent of the total carbon being moved around. But the carbon we're emitting wasn't part of that cycle! It was part of the geologic carbon cycle, a MUCH slower cycle by which carbon is trapped as rocks at a fairly constant (and very sow) rate, and released by weathering - and we are responsible for releasing geological carbon into the ecological cycle MUCH faster than naturally occurs. Weathering, global volcanic activity, etc - it all pales to nothing compared to us. And the result is that we're "filling up" the ecological carbon cycle - there's no mechanism to significantly increase the rate at which carbon is stored in rock, so instead it builds up as CO2 in the oceans and atmosphere. It could theoretically also be stored as biomass, but available evidence suggests that global biomass is actually shrinking rather than growing, so that's no help.
As for your heating and whether claims, I'm sorry to say they are simply false. There's plenty of specific regions that aren't experiencing warming, but that is to be e
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's no surprise to me that same demographic worships at the faux science altars of Mythbusters, Alton Brown, Bill Nye, and Niel DeGrasse Tyson - they want science, but only if it's tarted up, made entertaining, and reduced to sound bites they can pass around like cargo cultists.
I hate this being paroted around like it makes any point at all. It doesn't. You know who like to read science articles? Scientists. And just because a scientist knows physics does not mean they can understand all the jargon of biology, it NEEDS to be explained in a way that by-passes that specialized knowledge. And guess what? Some of us LIKE well written/explained concepts of complex topics, which is something most scientists lack the ability to do well. Most scientists don't take any writing classes and it shows, so if a well written article takes their ideas and explains it better than they can, I will prefer to read that, especially if it's in a field that I don't know well. Saying you don't like NDT or Bill Nye does NOT make you special, it makes you an elitist who doesn't understand that communication skills are an important part of the scientific process. Science does NOT exist in a vacuum, it is entwined in everything; politics, daily life, love, etc. Communicating that part of the world is important, and frankly we need more people that can explain scientific ideas to everyone--yes, other scientists as well--to make a better world.
Sorry if that was not your intended point, but I hear this thing constantly and it really gets under my skin. I study physics but my understanding of biology is, frankly, atrocious; so I rely upon communicators to get a basic understanding of DNA processes. Shows like Quirks and Quarks make up a lot of my understanding of the current work in a lot of fields, hell, even a lot of the complexities of physics I need describes in a way that most scientists can't do.
end rant.