- Does this sound balanced to you? Last week Al Gore trumpeted a leaked UN report on the alleged perils of global warming, so the CBS Evening News showed him pledging "to protect the environment with all my heart and soul." Balancing Gore on the October 26 newscast: Ralph Nader, the only other candidate who thinks global warming is a real threat requiring immediate government intervention in the free market.
- "Al Gore is suffering from election year delusion if he thinks his record on the environment is anything to be proud of," Nader twitted from Gore's left. The only other on-camera source in John Roberts' report: a Greenpeace spokesman, who said of Gore: "The promises are great, the rhetoric is great. Keeping the promises, doing what you say - that's our concern."
- CBS never told viewers of skeptical scientists whose insistence on proof is plainly irritating to those who impatiently wish to start re-shaping American society right away. Instead, the pols, activists and journalists conducted a closed discussion that treated the UN paper as irrefutable.
- "Earth's average surface temperature could rise from 2.7
to almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 10 years - that's
according to a draft report from the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," asserted Natalie
Pawelski, host of CNN's weekly Earth Matters.
- "Eleven degrees may not sound like much of a change, but to put it into perspective, consider this: the Earth's average global temperature today is only about nine degrees warmer than it was during the last Ice Age," Pawelski hyped, but allowed "some observers are wondering about the timing of this report, leaking out so close to the presidential election."
- Observers are doing a lot more than "wondering." Weeks ago, climate expert Patrick Michaels warned that Gore would cynically seek an "October environmental surprise," and - right on schedule - the heavily political UN document found its way to the public a month early. "A copy of the summary was obtained by The New York Times from someone who was eager to have the findings disseminated before the meetings in The Hague," related Andrew Revkin, the Times reporter who received the leaked document.
- TV reporters haven't talked about the still-to-be-officially-released report's flaws, but "fourteen international experts gathered on Capitol Hill in June to review the report. They unanimously agreed it contains systematic errors and omissions bordering on scientific fraud," revealed Cato Institute scholar Steve Milloy in a Sunday New York Post op-ed. Further, according to an editorial in today's European edition of the Wall Street Journal, "The vast evidence and models compiled by over 100 scientists, and casting doubt on the evidence of human-enhanced greenhouse effect, were ignored."
- Two questions for the networks: Are you unable to track down any of the numerous experts who disagree with the Gore-Nader-Greenpeace view of the environment? And will you seek to discover whether it's really the Earth or the Democrats' campaign that's in such peril that it is crucial to pump out a sloppy summary report a few weeks ahead of schedule? - Rich Noyes