#22) ED BEGLEY, JR. INTERVIEW: A Voice for the Planet
March 18th, 2010
#20) WARM UP TO ED BEGLEY, JR.
March 11th, 2010
Today I was going to summarize all the feedback on the Marc Morano interview (and there has been PLENTY), but I’m currently on the road in Colorado and haven’t had enough time to properly digest all that’s been said (btw, I’m giving the keynote address at the Arctic Workshop this evening in Winter Park). I want to do a good job of conveying all that came in for commentary so I’m going to hold off until Monday to deliver my summary. Instead, for today I want to give a little warm up to my interview with Ed Begley, Jr. coming next week and help you understand why I chose to interview him.
#19) ANALYSIS: WHY MARC MORANO IS SUCH A GOOD COMMUNICATOR
March 8th, 2010
Okay. Some of you are probably irritated with me for this title — you’re thinking, “Why do you have to compliment him?” As if I’m somehow fraternizing with the enemy and being a traitor to the cause of science and environmentalism. Maybe you’re still buying into the, “Ignore them and hope they’ll go away,” strategy. If so, you might want ask the folks who have been associated with Kerry, Gore and Climategate how that strategy worked out. In fact, it was one of the bits Morano went through in the interview — more or less saying, “Thank you for making my job so easy by trying to ignore us.”
Like him or not, Marc Morano is a master communicator
Marc Morano interviewed in the feature film, "Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy," in 2007 while he was still spokesman for Senator James Inhofe (R-OK)
Two weeks ago I interviewed Mike Mann, one of the climate scientists who has been at the middle of the Climategate story. Here I interview Marc Morano (whom I introduced on Monday with video clips of his television debates). In both cases I recorded about an hour of discussion, edited it down, then let them review the draft. In both cases they were sufficiently content with what I sent and made almost no changes.
YOUR COMMENTS ARE WANTED
As I said at the beginning of creating The Benshi, this is not a blog and there are no comments sections. However, for this and the Mike Mann interview, I am definitely interested in your thoughts. Which means I encourage everyone to send me an email at info AT randyolsonproductions DOT com with any commentary. I will do my best to absorb all of it and synthesize the overall feedback probably next week. Which means you’re welcome to send me all the foul language you want — the only people who will see it will be the people in our group. But more importantly, feel free to send detailed critiques of what either of them said. Think of it as a different sort of moderated discussion. And I’ll try my best to be reasonably fair in summarizing the feedback, as I’ve tried to be with these interviews.
#17) INTERVIEW WITH MARC MORANO: PART I – “The Muhammad Ali of Global Warming ‘Debating'”
March 1st, 2010
Marc Morano: The skeptics' prizefighter
This week on The Benshi we’re focusing on Marc Morano, arguably the loudest mouth in the climate skeptic movement with his increasingly popular website, www.climatedepot.com. He is a former field correspondent for Rush Limbaugh, helped to promote the Kerry Swift Boat Veterans story, and former spokesman for Senator James Inhofe (the top climate skeptic in the Senate).
#16) INTERVIEW: Screenwriter MARGARET NAGLE – Dorothy was a scientist!
February 25th, 2010
Margaret Nagle is a Hollywood screenwriter whose 2005 HBO movie, “Warm Springs” (which, by the way, is one of my favorite movies of the past decade) won the Emmy for Best TV Movie. Nagle also won the Writers Guild Award for that screenplay. In the movie she told the story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s struggle with polio — how he left his upscale, Victorian life in New York City, moved to Warm Springs in the backwoods of Georgia for several years where he witnessed poverty, racism, and illiteracy the likes of which he had never imagined and eventually managed to return to his political life and become President. In a fascinating HBO interview Margaret tells about how she grew up with a brother who was disabled in a car accident at an early age — a part of her background that gave her a connection to the FDR story. Last year she wrote the script for a television pilot called, “The Eastmans,” in which Donald Sutherland played a heart surgeon. My film school classmate, best friend, and co-star of my book, Jason Ensler, directed the pilot. I spoke with Margaret recently and she mentioned that she was working on a new script involving quite a bit of medical science, so I thought it would be interesting to have a chat with her about the interface between science and cinema.
#15) SPEED: What the world of science communication needs
February 22nd, 2010
In 2006 Newsweek published an article about the frustrations the U.S. military was encountering in Iraq with a decades-old tradition — the “Tuesday Press Briefing.” Since the Vietnam War, the release of information by the military to the press would take place mostly at the once-a-week press conference, but it was a concept that had evolved in a world without the internet, Youtube, social networks, and now even Twitter. The problem with the Iraq war was that things had changed. By the time the general stood up to the podium to tell the press what’s up each Tuesday, pretty much everything he had to say had already been blogged and Youtubed about and thus was old news. The media environment had changed, the military needed to adapt to the new environment. The same is true for the world of science. It’s what I was saying in my movie, “Flock of Dodos” — that the media environment has changed, but the science world is dangerously slow to respond. Now I’m saying it even more loudly with the train wreck that has been Climategate.
#14) MIKE MANN Part II: INTERVIEW – Who will provide communication expertise and leadership for the science community?
February 18th, 2010
On Monday I posted the CBS News clip which I felt represented poor journalism by the once famous and even virtuous CBS News Department. Here’s the clip again for your viewing, so that you can see what they did — rather than just mentioning that a defamatory music video had been made about Mike Mann, they showed large parts of the video which were accompanied by the lyrics spelled out.
In this interview I speak with Mike about this news clip, the media in general, and a number of other topics. My feeling is that the takeaway message of what he has to say is that: 1) there is now a war being waged against climate scientists, 2) the scientists are receiving very little, if any, professional media assistance (and I mean from professionals who are used to dealing with combative media, not just university outreach types), and 3) there are no new actions being taken yet to deal with what is obviously a very aggressive attack on climate science.
#13) MIKE MANN Part I: The Media are Not Necessarily Your Friends
February 15th, 2010
Two years ago we had a great screening of my movie, “Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy,” at Penn State University which featured among the post-screening panel discussion members climatology professor Mike Mann. Unlike some climate scientists two years ago who were still trying to follow Gore’s attempt to put on blinders and pretend there was no significant climate skeptic movement, Mike was very realistic. He said he enjoyed the movie and felt the focus on the complexity of communicating climate science was reasonable. He visited me last fall in Los Angeles and we got a chance to talk at length about these issues. His textbook on climate change, “Dire Predictions,” is excellent and given his history with having developed “the hockey stick graph,” and testified to Congress about it, he is one of the central figures in both the world of global warming science, as well as unfortunately the world of global warming politics that has emerged over the past decade. More importantly, and more recently, his name ended up at the center of the Climategate controversy that erupted this past December. In this two part essay I want to first talk about the recent CBS News segment about Mike, then on Thursday will present an interview with him about his recent experiences with the media.