In the new edition, the AP Stylebook tells journalists to stop calling climate change skeptics “deniers.”
The 2017 Associated Press (AP) yearly style guide is out, and it boasts numerous changes where the wire service again favors liberal biases over impartiality or conservative ideals. This is most telling in areas of abortion, illegal immigrants, terrorism, guns, and climate change.
The AP Stylebook is ostensibly a middle-of-the-road guide that most journalists can rely on for universal rules on grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and word choice. Yet with each edition, AP’s covert bias becomes more pronounced, none more so than this year.
Even climate change has been updated. Having previously told journalists to refer to global warming as “climate change” and to call climate change skeptics “doubters,” AP is ready to move on and squash the climate resistance once and for all.
In the new edition, the AP Stylebook tells journalists to stop calling climate change skeptics “deniers.” It tells writers to “describe those who don’t accept climate science or dispute that the world is warming from man-made forces” and “use climate change doubters or those who reject mainstream climate science. Avoid use of skeptics or deniers.”
But above all, never use the word “skeptic,” the guide warns. Skepticism is one of the very cornerstones that science is built upon. Calling someone a skeptic invites discussion and tells the reader that other people don’t subscribe to all tenets of global warming theory. In an attempt to dismiss skeptics, writers and editors use the pejorative term “deniers” in copy in both print and web.
Yet despite that none of the catastrophic global warming predictions are coming true, AP is as resolute as ever in its issuance of these stylistic guidelines. Writers, meet your new science overlords.
Most journalists, especially those at The New York Times and Washington Post, went out of their way to call Scott Pruitt a climate denier when President Donald Trump first nominated him as EPA administrator.
After first running a rather benign, well-informed online article about the announcement, The Times’ bias police descended from grappling hooks and rewrote the headline to include the words ‘climate denier’ and surreptitiously added a new paragraph detailing Pruitt’s alleged links to Big Oil.
The slanted edits were uncovered by The Daily Caller. The outlet caught the online revisions via screen captures.