Climate change denying Senator a challenge for our media

New Australian Senator, Malcolm Roberts
 suggests scientific charts
such as this have been "manipulated".
 

The election of Malcolm Roberts as a One Nation senator has put Australia’s media in a difficult spot.

In his first speech to Parliament on Tuesday, Roberts made many false claims about climate change. He said that climate change was a “scam” and implied that it was some sort of conspiracy between all the major international research agencies. “... there is no data proving human use of hydro-carbon fuels affects climate,” he said.

Most news outlets had stopped covering the views of climate science deniers in regular reporting. There is a clear scientific consensus that the world is warming and that human carbon emissions have caused it, so reporting the views of a few non-experts who push fanciful theories with no credible evidence is seen as “false balance”.

But journalists are in a different position when someone in an important office holds such views.

Read Michael Slezak’s story on The Guardian – “Debunking Malcolm Roberts: the case against a climate science denier.”