MediaWatch: July 1997
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: July 1997
- Gun Rights Forces Outgunned on TV
- NewsBites: Camel Canard
- Revolving Door: Sidney's Clinton-Loving Slant
- Hearings? What Hearings?
- They All Do It
- Nolanda's Non-Story, Religion and Rehabilitation
- Kurault as Liberal Advocate
- Janet Cooke Award: Another Frontal Assault on Objectivity
Janet Cooke Award: Another Frontal Assault on Objectivity
The arrival of the Republican Congress in 1995 led to panicked boob-tube predictions of environmental doom. A Peter Jennings promo plugged a series of reports "which will tell you precisely what the new Congress has in mind: the most frontal assault on the environment in 25 years. Is this what the country wants?" An NBC promo warned: "Safe food, safe water, safe air, safe transportation. You have this protection now, but you might be about to lose it."
Now, as Clinton's Environmental Protection Agency prepares draconian new air regulations its own advisory panels don't support, regulations that are opposed even by Democratic congressmen and big city mayors, why haven't the networks isolated the liberal environmental extreme as out of touch? Instead, network coverage of environmental issues echoes the activists on that extreme and all their statistical claims. For using the fifth anniversary of the United Nations Rio summit as another occasion for unanswered extremist propaganda, ABC and NBC earned the Janet Cooke Award.
On the June 22 NBC Nightly News, reporter Linda Fasulo declared: "Five years after the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the goals of that meeting remain elusive." Christopher Flavin of the liberal Worldwatch Institute claimed: "The bold hopes and promises that were put forth by world leaders in 1992 -- to stabilize the climate, to protect natural areas, to slow population growth -- those promises have, unfortunately, not been fulfilled."
Fasulo continued: "At the Rio conference, 153 nations agreed to curb global warming, pledging to cut back emissions of so-called greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the year 2000. But these were only targets with no enforcement provisions. Today emissions are up nearly everywhere, including a six percent rise in the United States, the world's biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect. Burning of the Brazilian rain forest has actually increased. Rain forests are home to most of the world's species. Rio produced a treaty to preserve biological diversity. Since that agreement was ratified by 161 countries, but not the United States, at least 100,000 species have been lost."
Free-market environmentalists would quickly note that America may be the largest producer of greenhouse gases, but it's also the largest producer of goods and services consumed around the world. Jonathan Adler of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) told MediaWatch there was "no basis for the 100,000 species claim. Scientists don't know how many species there are, let alone how many are being lost."
CEI has also pointed out that since 1973, only 23 species have been removed from the Endangered Species list. Eight were listed in error, a court invalidated one listing, seven recovered, and seven actually became extinct. Fasulo allowed no one to explain why the U.S. didn't sign the "biodiversity" treaty. One reason: the treaty language demanded the U.S. hand out foreign aid to Third World countries with no conditions -- meaning it could not be designated to save plants and animals.
Fasulo concluded: "World leaders expect to reaffirm their commitment to sustainable development, but remain divided on the exact steps to take." Fasulo may have ended with the concept of a debate, but there wasn't anything resembling one in her story.
Two days later on ABC's World News Tonight, Bill Blakemore publicized a study by the liberal World Wildlife Fund (WWF): "For thousands of years, the ocean's been rising just over an inch every hundred years. That's normal after an Ice Age. But suddenly at the turn of the century, just as industry and coal and oil power were really taking hold, the rise in sea level accelerated from one inch to six inches in a hundred years, and this rise is still speeding up. Over the next 100 years, scientists predict a rise in sea level of one to three feet. In virtually every national park, scientists are seeing rapid, unnatural changes due to global warming, and the vast majority now agree that's due to gases from industry, power plants, even the planes we fly."
After airing two soundbites of the WWF's Adam Markham and publicizing his study without a challenge from conservatives, Blakemore concluded: "The delicate balances of nature here in the U.S. and around the world are now clearly being disrupted by global warming. The U.S., with only four percent of the world's population, produces nearly a quarter of its greenhouse gases, one reason President Clinton will be feeling political heat when he visits the U.N. conference here."
In dissent, Jonathan Adler told MediaWatch: "Satellites and weather balloons show no warming since 1979. If anything, there is slight cooling. Most (two-thirds) of 20th century warming occurred before 1950, prior to most industrial emissions."
As usual, Blakemore presented "scientists" as a monolith of politically correct opinion. But the National Center for Policy Analysis recently noted a Gallup poll showing that only 17 percent of members of the Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Society believed that warming in the 20th century has resulted from greenhouse gas emissions, mainly CO2 from burning fossil fuels. And only 13 percent of the scientists responding to a survey conducted by the radical environmental group Greenpeace said they believe current energy use patterns will result in catastrophic climate change.
Most important, the networks ignored the UN's own change on climate change: in 1995, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reversed its endorsement of computer climate models by suggesting dramatic warming predicted by the models "produced a greater mean warming than has been observed to date."
But then, a debate would only undermine the atmosphere of fear the networks try to build in these stories. ABC or NBC wouldn't consider airing good news, like Ronald Bailey's statement in his book The True State of the Planet: "In the United States, ambient levels of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, atmospheric ozone, and particulates in the air are decreasing. Industrial pollution has been largely eliminated as a source of contamination in most of America's rivers, lakes, and streams. Consequently, 95 percent of the nation's rivers are considered fishable."
Neither Fasulo nor Blakemore responded to MediaWatch calls for comment. Reports like theirs display no evidence they're the slightest bit serious about going beyond liberal press releases to investigate both sides of a rigorous scientific debate. Instead, they suggest that environmental issues evolve from a strange spectrum, with a set of Earth-hating extremists who deserve no air time at one pole, and an unassailable consensus of sweet reason at the other.
