Omitting for Obama:
Table of Contents:
ClimateGate
On Saturday, November 21, the New York Times reported on its
front page that hacked e-mails from climate researchers at the
University of East Anglia in England exposed how the "scientific
experts" cited so often by the media on global warming called their
opponents "idiots," proposed censoring them from scientific journals,
and twisted scientific data to support their policy agenda. (This time,
the newspapers were first. The Washington Post also reported
the scandal a day later.) In one 1999 e-mail exchange about charts
showing apparent climate patterns over the last two millenniums,
scientist Phil Jones boasted of a "trick" to "hide the decline" in
global temperatures.
Fox News and talk radio heavily focused
on whether dire forecasts of catastrophic warming have been
scientifically manipulated with "tricks." Eight days after the first
newspaper story, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos touched on the subject on
the November 29 This Week, noting "there’s been a partisanizing
of this issue and then you throw in one more complication we've had
over the last week." It was a "complication" that arose from
"partisanizing," not a substantive scientific controversy.
The
scandal threatened to ruin President Obama’s efforts to push for
"climate change" goals at an international summit in Copenhagen in
December but the networks ignored it for two weeks. When they decided
to cover it, ABC, CBS, and NBC each only gave the allegations two
stories, which were full of skeptical denigrations of their political
or scientific importance.
Compare that to another White House
scandal: Tareq and Michaele Salahi sneaking in uninvited into the first
Obama White House state dinner with the prime minister of India. From
November 26, when the story broke, through the weekend that Climategate
finally emerged (December 6), there were 57 morning and evening news
stories or interviews on the Big Three networks. There were 31 on NBC
(which scored an exclusive interview with the Salahis on December 1),
14 on ABC, and 12 on CBS. There were another 12 anchor-read briefs.
Most
of the heat in this scandal was focused on the tackiness of the
gate-crashers, not on failures by the White House staff. On NBC, Brian
Williams complained: "If this turns out to be somebody’s 15 minutes,
the equivalent of state dinner balloon boy and girl, I think that’ll be
tragic and almost pathetic because people in the White House, all White
Houses, work hard. It’s hard to put on a state dinner. And it was an
honor to be invited and an honor for all the invited guests to be
there."
The first news story came on NBC Nightly News on December 4,
with anchor Brian Williams finally acknowledging "a new scandal burning
up the Net these days." Reporter Anne Thompson said global-warming
skeptics "say these e-mails from Britain’s University of East Anglia
show climate scientists massaging data and suppressing studies by those
who disagree." She added "critics say the e-mails show catastrophic
predictions of countries and people devastated by warming need to be
reconsidered." She also noted "Today, in a letter to Congress, 25
leading U.S. scientists accused climate change opponents of
misrepresenting the e-mails’ significance." She worried that "the
e-mails may end up giving politicians from coal and oil-producing
states another reason to delay taking action to reduce emissions."
CBS Evening News offered
the only story that underlined how scientists tried to "hide the
decline" in temperatures by swapping temperature data. But it aired on
Saturday, when it was blacked out in the Eastern and Central time zones
for college football. Kimberly Dozier reported: "An e-mail from 1999
shows scientists worked hard to demonstrate an upward trend. They talk
of using a trick to hide the decline in global temperatures. It worked
like this: when temperature readings gathered from studying tree rings
showed what looked like a decline in temperatures from the 1980s to the
present, the scientists added in measurements taken later by more
modern instruments, which gave them the answer they wanted."
ABC finally broke in on Sunday evening’s World News.
But they provided no specifics from the reams of e-mails and data from
East Anglia University that caused the scandal, and concluded their
report with a pay-no-attention-to-skeptics closer from reporter Clayton
Sandell: "The science is solid, according to a vast majority of
researchers, with hotter temperatures, melting glaciers, and rising sea
level providing the proof."
Sandell was echoing what the United Nations bureaucrats stated at the Copenhagen summit opened days later. The Times
of London reported that U.N. climate chief Rajendra Pachauri addressed
skeptics who "find it inconvenient" to accept the "inevitability" of
dramatic global warming. He insisted the U.N.-organized panel of
scientists have "a record of transparent and objective assessment
stretching over 21 years performed by tens of thousands of dedicated
scientists from all corners of the globe." Neither the scientists or
the reporters have offered an "objective assessment."
The Obama administration and its left-wing environmentalist base
clearly favored dire scenarios as a way to goad reluctant citizens into
onerous tax and regulatory schemes to "save the planet." So ABC opened
their Copenhagen coverage with more doom: "Facing a clock some say has
ticked down to zero, today 192 nations came together to take on a
potential global catastrophe." NBC’s Anne Thompson echoed: "This is
about life or death -- 192 countries are here in Copenhagen to cut the
carbon emissions changing the climate and threatening the very
existence of some nations and their people." CBS’s Mark Phillips even
stood in water up to his neck and then became completely submerged on
camera to illustrate the feared impact of rising sea levels: "The
Maldives have become the canary in the global warming coal mine."
By
December 10, ABC’s David Wright was denigrating Climategate as "an
inconvenient scandal," playing on the Al Gore movie title. On CBS,
Wyatt Andrews relayed how "to many Republicans, ClimateGate proves that
global warming is a deception," before he countered: "But if that’s
true, it’s a fraud adopted by most of the world's leading scientists,
along with NASA, the U.N., the American Medical Association, and the
National Academies of Science of 32 countries, including the United
States."
