According ot the Columbia Journalism Review in a recent cover story . . .
. . . television weathermen.
Forget Climategate, Glaciergate, and all the rest. The magazine has doubled down on the argument-by-assertion that the global-warming debate is over and alarmists won.
Despite the skeptics' conspiracy theories, climate change is real. But beyond this basic truth, there is much that isn't known -- whiat is the timeframe for likely consequences of warming, for instance, and what are the best strategies to counter it? Press coverage of the climate story has improved in recent years, as most outlets abandoned false balance and acknowledged the weight of evidence.
CJR then attacks, not the data falsifiers, but local television weathermen, many of whom have either expressed doubt or remained silent about AGW.
Weathermen are meteorologists, the magazine helpfully explains, and meteorologists are not climatologists, and only climatologists can opine authoritatively on climate.
The article -- "Hot Air," the cover story -- is by Charles Homans, who declares that the weight of scientific evidence supports the theory of anthropogenic global warming.
Mr. Homans, by the way, is not a climatologist.
(Charles Homans, "Hot Air," Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 2010)
Scroll down to read comments with more common sense than the main article, including this: "Mr. Homans: What is Al Gore's degree in?"
The problem with journalism, as CJR sees it, is not that the press is liberal but that it's not liberal enough.
The chairman of the board that runs the magazine is Victor Navasky, former editor of the Nation. It's not reportorial journalism that interests Mr. Navasky, but advocacy.
Not even the New York Times is so forthrightly willing to sweep the climate science scandals under the rug, but Walter Mead Russell recently did a good takedown of that newspaper's inadequate coverage, coupled with a brief outline of the scandals. Here he again questions the New York Times's inadequate response to "the multifaceted credibility collapse that is Climategate" as it "majestically and inexorably unfolds."
Meanwhile, editors of our very own newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, are also nowhere to be seen on Climategate, their last word being that they were still in the alarmist camp. The case that global warming is a threat is still "overwhelmingly persuasive," they declared back in December.
The editors also threw a bouquet of roses to the alarmists' alarmist, Dr. James Hansen, whom, against all evidence, they regard as nonideological. This is the same Dr. James Hansen who calls coal trains "death trains" on their way to the crematoria and who seriously proposes to put energy company executives -- no small number of whom live in in Houston, Texas -- on trial for "high crimes against humanity and nature."
That nonideological Dr. James Hansen.
As is often the case, Chronicle readers did a righteous takedown of their betters at the newspaper.
Oh, well. At least the newspaper didn't blame Frank Billingsley for the troubles of its pet theory.
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INSTANT UPDATE: Columbia Journalism Review's science blog, "Observatory," also sings from the global-warming choirbook, but it also clearly sees that Climategate is a serious issues that needs a thoughtful journalistic response.
It would be wonderful to see an American newspaper publish a multi-part series (in print or online) that really takes the time and space necessary to give readers the full context, in a semi-narrative fashion, of the IPCC's recent woes.
Indeed it would.
The point is that no major American newspaper has done any such thing.
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