Will MSM Look into the Global Warming Abyss and Find Their Character?
Filed Under: Al Gore, Environmental News on June 13, 2011
by Russell Cook, Big Journalism
Considering how incredibly rare it is to find balanced global warming reporting in the mainstream media, Noel Sheppard’s 4/24 NewsBusters headline was worthy of a double-take: “Retired Anchorman Apologizes for Presenting Both Sides of Global Warming Debate.” Having written an American Thinker article last year where I quantified the outright bias at the PBS NewsHour to be a ratio of 3 “skeptic” to 200+ “pro-Al Gore/IPCC” going back to 1996, I was puzzled. Who could it be?
I was disappointed to see a name I didn’t recognize – imagine it being NBC’s Tom Brokaw. The bigger disappointment for me was in Sheppard’s third and fourth paragraph reproduction of the original Duluth Budgeteerarticle, where it said:
The TV newsman’s mea culpa about having misreported climate change came after of years of treating the story the same as he would any other, requiring the views of two opposing parties…
….climate change is not a pro or con issue; it’s a scientific fact. And journalists who work to “balance” a story present an inaccurate picture when they give equal weight to sources promulgating inaccurate facts.
The significance of that eludes most people, but I’d been researching the origins of the fossil fuel funding accusation against skeptic scientists for 16+ months, two of my articles about it are at Breitbart pages here and here, amonga pile of others I’ve written. For me, the words “equal balance”/”equal weight” in reference to people pushing “inaccurate facts” jumped right off the page as yet another repetition of 15-year old talking points consolidated by anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan and his associates at the Ozone Action enviro-advocacy group in 1996. For those not familiar with that group, just think Greenpeace because its founder John Passacantando merged Ozone Action with Greenpeace USA in 2000 and took over as its new executive director.
Regardless of that group’s motives, we have to commend them for fine-tuning their message into a concise 3-part mantra – settled science / skeptic scientists paid by fossil fuel industries to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” / the media gives skeptics too much unneeded attention. Even the dumbest of their followers can easily remember it.
