PrintJanuary 3, 2011
Leftist media in full court press backing warmism
If a major news story casts doubt on man-caused global warming, does it make a sound? If you are a promoter of the global warming crisis, those stories misdirect public opinion and prevent everyone from solving the crisis, while the rest of us see them as specks of gold in raging torrents of stories affirming Al Gore's settled science.
Consider the ClimateGate story and its recent one-year anniversary. According to the Media Research Center,
Even though many considered it a huge scandal, the three broadcast networks didn't think so. They ignored the story for roughly two weeks, and have only mentioned it in a dozen stories in the past year.
My own favorite mainstream media punching bag, PBS' NewsHour did at least give the story cursory mention ten days after it broke, but then couldn't be troubled to offer in-depth discussion of it until four months later, its solitary effort of lengthy analysis on the topic. This was noteworthy if only because it featured skeptic scientist Pat Michaels, the first such skeptic to appear on the NewsHour offering any opposing viewpoint of significance since George Taylor in 2007. That 2007 program was the NewsHour's first major foray into global warming skeptic opinion since the interview of an industry executive in 1997, and was one of just a few bits that prevented the NewsHour from having a 100% bias against presenting such viewpoints, as I quantified in a prior American Thinker article.
Yet, Joe Romm had this to say about ClimateGate's anniversary in his 11/15 ClimateProgress blog titled "A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice" (hat tip to Michael Wiant),
The media will be doing countless retrospectives, most of which will be wasted ink...focusing on climate scientists at the expense of climate science...the overwhelming majority of the mainstream media...devoted a large fraction of its climate ‘ink' in the last 12 months to what was essentially a non-story...
Meanwhile, we have the infamous recent op-ed in the NY Times in which the ‘science' tells us to expect nasty snowstorms caused by global warming, and the NewsHour telling us about the ‘science' of rapidly melting glaciers, and ‘studies' of how to save polar bears.
Romm's efforts to frame the media as not doing its job properly are nothing new, Ross Gelbspan had this to say in his 2004 Boiling Point book about the media,
For many years, the press accorded the same weight to the "skeptics" as it did to mainstream scientists. This was done in the name of journalistic balance. In fact, it was journalistic laziness.
And for good measure, he said this about snowstorms in his 1997 The Heat is On, when speaking about a series of weather patterns being proof of global warming,
The severe weather has continued into 1996. My own back yard became a snow-buried casualty of New England's 1995-96 winter from hell.
It's a no-win exercise: excess snow is proof of global warming... unless someone in the mainstream breaks ranks and seriously asks if the prior "warming" from a few years ago couldn't be proof for the original 1970s global cooling crisis.
Everyone knows how fickle the mainstream media is, and how they are ultimately driven to out-scoop each other for ratings gains. If they smell blood in the water of an imminent collapse to this entire so-called crisis, they will turn on each other and promoters like Romm and Gelbspan in a heartbeat, no doubt with yells of being hoodwinked or assumptions that other news outlets had initially checked the veracity of the "warming" science everyone else relies on.
2011 could turn out to be quite an entertaining year.
Russell Cook's collection of writings on this issue can be seen at "The ‘96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists - or at least what I've dredged up."
