The fake flights and Australia’s history of media-driven science denial
Is there ever a story as juicy as a the minister for emissions reductions being caught out using data that sneakily increases emissions?
Australia’s said minister sent a letter to Sydney’s Mayor, Clover Moore, accusing her of rank hypocrisy on climate change. He cited a scanned PDF of the City of Sydney’s (CoS) annual report, showing millions of dollars in spending on flights. How can someone who champions climate change spend public money so wildly on international and domestic flights? It is an outrage.
It turns out that the figures were wrong. And, not misquoted, or misunderstood. They were around 45 times bigger than the original report, and they sat in the body text of the report, right where the real figures were in the online version.
Did the City of Sydney have an old draft with a typo sitting on their website? No, archives confirm the original and accurate version was uploaded in November 2018. Perhaps it was altered later? No, again — the metadata on the PDF file shows it was last changed in Nov 2018. Taylor later claimed there were many random versions of the report on the site, but his ‘proof’ simply compared the Word and PDF versions of the same files, which have minor formatting differences because that’s how those files render. When you convert a word document into a PDF, it doesn’t change $4,206.32 into $14.2 (million). So what on Earth is the scanned PDF, provided to a journalist as evidence of the claim?
Only one explanation makes sense: a human nabbed a copy of the original, changed the numbers, printed it out, and scanned that altered copy. At some point, this document ended up being given to a journalist at the Daily Telegraph. The final give-away is the fact that the font used for the altered text changes between the scanned, doctored version and the original PDF on the council’s website, as demonstrated by The Guardian:
Labor has referred the whole thing to the cops, and Taylor has continued to deflect. As a few journalists point out, it’s stuff like this that shakes trust in politicians. But what about trust in journalists? The Guardian broke the story of the fakery, but why did it get so far before that happened?
Taylor’s initial act was to ‘leak’ his letter to Anna Caldwell, a journalist at the Daily Telegraph. “His letter was then leaked to the Daily Telegraph, even before it had been received by Moore”, wrote the ABC’s Laura Tingle. ‘Leak’ has become a weird euphemism for ‘give’, within media and politics. Surely the public has a right to know why it was l̶e̶a̶k̶e̶d̶ given to the journalist — alarm bells are ringing about the secretive flow of information, here.
The Daily Telegraph’s journalist contacted Moore, and was told that the numbers were completely wrong. But instead of investigating the reason for the discrepancy, the journalist accused the City of Sydney of lying about their figures, and altering their website’s report, when she wrote to the council in an email:
“Taylor’s office printed a copy of your annual report out on September 6. I have a copy of those relevant pages which I’ll forward you in a second email. But they say that the cost of interstate visits was $14.2 million and overseas visits was $1.7 million. If you look online now, that report has been changed or updated to say interstate visits were $4206 and overseas visits were $1727”
Checking whether the council had sneakily changed their reports would have taken approximately 13 seconds, in the metadata of the council’s version. That never happened. The reasons for this are obvious — the story, of climate change warriors spending ludicrously massive sums on luxurious air travel ws far too juicy to pass up. The Daily Telegraph’s original story began with:
“Lord Mayor Clover Moore has been told by the federal government to rein in the hundreds of thousands of dollars her council is spending on international and domestic travel if she is serious about lecturing Australia on climate change”
Is ‘lecturing’ really a neutral choice of terminology? Of course not. It is a mirroring of the emotions held by the paper’s audience. There was never any hope that the source data was going to be scrutinised. The core goal here was to frame efforts to reduce emissions and respond to the most rigorously confirmed scientific warning in the history of our species as ‘lecturing’.
It is a media outlet that has targeted Moore specifically, and climate action in general, for a full decade, now. It loathes every single scale of active effort to reduce emissions. Bike lanes, efficient lighting, carbon pricing, renewable energy, public transport are all triggers for stunningly intense and hyper-emotional backlash from the media outlet, both from its journalists and its stable of columnists.
One study from 2013, published by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (based at UTS) analysed articles and commentary from ten major media outlets between February to April 2011, and 2012. The data from the study is only a snapshot of those months, but it outlines how clearly the Daily Telegraph, along with the Herald Sun (and the Australian) use both articles and opinion pieces (the second chart) to instil doubt about climate change:
Botched data, major misunderstandings of climate science and energy market dynamics, and re-framing that focuses on exaggerating the short-term impacts of climate action and ignoring the impacts of inaction all work together to help political forces prosecute a clear agenda: an increase in emissions, and the continued protection of fossil fuel industries from the conclusions of science and the demands of the people.
We don’t need to scratch our heads about why, when the Daily Telegraph was emailed a bundle of (potentially) criminal forgeries, it simply took them on face value. We don’t need to speculate about why the paper yelled at the City of Sydney Council for sneakily changing their annual reports, instead of checking the source and figuring out the high-school-grade trick being pulled.
Whoever made that faked report probably didn’t get the outcome they were hoping for. But it is a single embarrassing failure in a roiling sea of tens of thousands of successful efforts to use deceptions, lies, falsehoods and errors to prosecute an agenda of fossil fuel protectionism.
