Beginning late Wednesday night, I had an interesting social-media argument with Providence Phoenix news editor Philip Eil.  It spanned multiple threads and even jumped from Twitter to Facebook and back, so if you’re interested in reading it, you’ll have to collect the pieces on your own.

The wrangle began when I spotted an example of what has apparently become something of a crusade for the young editor to hold Providence Journal commentary-page editor Ed Achorn “accountable” for publishing a political cartoon from a “climate change denier” point of view.  I thought I was mostly joking when I asked, the day the cartoon appeared, how many Providence Journal readers would simply not be able to process it as information.  It turns out that the question should have applied to other journalists and editors.

Put simply, Eil cannot believe that anybody who is not some sort of strange ignoramus of a fanatic or on the payroll of the Once-ler could question the scientific consensus on global warming.  Not surprisingly, then, one thread of the conversation simply ended after I raised this chart showing that almost all of the global warming models got the last two decades completely wrong.

Throughout the discourse, it became clear that my motivation is to be questioned implicitly, with the burden on me to prove that I’m not speaking from a talking-points list for my pay, because I work for a conservative think tank.  On the other hand, my pointing out that the incandescent light bulb ban appears to have been a project of businesses to sell more expensive products received no response.  Likewise, Eil seemed disinclined even to consider the financial incentives that might inspire the U.S. Navy to invest in global warming preparedness whether or not the theory is correct.

All of the above ties back to the argument that kicked the exchange off.  My primary interest in entering the conversation was Eil’s view that newspapers shouldn’t even deign to publish the opinions of “deniers.”  “Factual inaccuracies” are not “opposing views,” he wrote repeatedly.  (Let’s put aside whether it’s possible to be factually inaccurate when doubting a prediction about the future.)  More than once, he linked to L.A. Times opinion editor Paul Thornton, who explained:

Before going into some detail about why these letters don’t make it into our pages, I’ll concede that, aside from my easily passing the Advanced Placement biology exam in high school, my science credentials are lacking. I’m no expert when it comes to our planet’s complex climate processes or any scientific field. Consequently, when deciding which letters should run among hundreds on such weighty matters as climate change, I must rely on the experts — in other words, those scientists with advanced degrees who undertake tedious research and rigorous peer review.

In the interest of clarity, I’ll state, here, the extremity of my worldview: Largely owing to Progressives’ tendency to think of everything in terms of ideology and politics, as well as their “long march through the institutions,” we’ve reached the point that appeals to their authority are not only a textbook logical fallacy, but also not very convincing.

Indeed, as editors in the institution of news media, Eil and Thornton have elevated that particular logical fallacy to the point of policy about what information their readers should be provided.  Not being an expert himself, Thornton looks to “the experts” to determine whether he should publish essays that (no doubt) disagree with his point of view in the ideological and political realms.  And, in turn, Thornton’s authority provides cover for Eil.

So, we find that 98% of network news reports about a ship stuck in Antarctic ice neglected to mention that its mission was in the service of the climate change cause.  Put in more directly relevant terms, the experts in news collection, trained as they are to find the important details in current events, have decided for the masses that the scientists’ purpose (even the fact that they are scientists) is not relevant to the fact that they got stuck in ice.

This process runs backwards.  The rationalizations of Thornton and Eil are eerily similar to those unearthed when climate scientists’ emails were hacked and published, creating a scandal over, among other things, the peer review process for scientific journals on the topic.  And naturally, there can be applications of the principle of “factual inaccuracies are not opposing views” earlier, still — in the question of who gets research jobs, achieves advanced degrees, or even decides to go into the field.

The process runs all the way back to the lesson plan to which I linked above, on the word “Once-ler.”  As early as pre-K, students whose teachers turn to that mainstream resource (Scholastic) will be asked such questions as, “Is it right to make a ton of money while destroying the environment?”  If that’s where the machine begins, it’s not difficult to imagine the momentum it builds up by the time we’re measuring an advance-degree consensus.

Of course, this institutionalization of a particular worldview applies not just to climatology, but to every field that produces any sort of expert that might be ideologically or politically useful in any way, which is pretty much all of them.  Journalists, one might reasonably suggest, are particularly useful in this regard.