The American Spectator

Print Email

Text Size

Media Matters

(Page 2 of 3)

* Morano made much of the fact that Oppenheimer gets about $200,000 a year from the Environmental Defense Fund, "an environmental special interest."

* When fellow panelist ABC reporter Bill Blakemore did a story about NASA scientist James Hansen's allegations of Bush administration censorship, "he failed to tell ABC World News Tonight viewers that Hansen had endorsed John Kerry and received money from Kerry's wife's foundation."

Morano then flips the bias card over. He asked us to imagine that skeptical climatologist Pat Michaels was the NASA scientist who alleged censorship (wait for it) by the Clinton administration. If Michaels "claimed that Bill Clinton had censored him but he had endorsed Bob Dole and got money from Bob Dole's wife, do you think that [Blakemore] would have left out that 'inconvenient fact?'" Morano asks.

He says that he isn't trying to impugn the integrity of decent scientists. Rather, "I'm saying if you want to label, label fairly."

DAN FAGIN -- I'M SORRY, "THE ESTEEMED DAN FAGIN" -- is introduced as a "former SEJ president, former Newsday reporter and currently a professor of journalism at NYU and associate director of the science health and reporting program."

Fagin claims to speak for science. He insists the science on catastrophic global warming is firmly established and affects annoyance that anyone would question this. He insists, "These are facts. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but they are not entitled to their own facts."

The distance of academia, Fagin says, allows him to speak more freely than he could as a reporter. He charges that Senator Inhofe lied over a fairly technical point of climate history. And he says that if reporters allow the wrong voices in the climate debate to be heard, "that is telling a different kind of lie." And besides, the climate non-doomsdayers "represent an overwhelming minority."

"Consensus [in science] is hard won. It's hard won. It means something when it occurs," Fagin insists. Journalists are obliged to bow down and worship that consensus.

As to the charges of bias, he says, "I agree that there is a bias but it is a fundamentally different bias than one that Senator Inhofe thinks exists." It is a bias in favor of "fairness" and "conflict" (i.e., balance). Both journalists and academics, in Fagin's view, advance their careers by "going against the grain" and basically making stuff up.

So why aren't there ten times the number of climate skeptics and young journalists hyping their findings to the heavens, I wonder.

He has an answer for that too. The problem is that "we" journalists and academics "are reality constrained. We are constrained by the facts." And making a case against climate alarmism on its merits is just "not possible in this case."

Fagin compares Senator Inhofe to Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, and the leaders of the People's Republic of China. They all embrace the "Big Lie" strategy of public relations, you see, and they'll all fall down in the end.

The audience hoots and claps.

ANDREW REVKIN IS AN ENVIRONMENT REPORTER for the New York Times and so his words are surprising for their utter lack of condescension. He tells his colleagues "frankly, we've handed a lot of red meat to Senator Inhofe."

Revkin says that one of the problems is the basic disagreement over what people mean when they speak of "global warming." It can mean anything from the greenhouse effect to imminent climatological disaster. He tells the reporters that they should be very careful in their use of language, so that they don't accidentally make absurdly far reaching claims.

topics:
Bill Clinton, Television, Environment, Global Warming, NATO, North Korea, Oil