Twenty Years of Advocacy, Not Journalism, on Global Warming

The media has forged a consensus around climate change.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL APRIL 23, 2010, 5:39 P.M. ET

By RICH NOYES The Media Research Center



For more than two decades, the so-called mainstream media have preached the dangers of manmade global warming, insisting American businesses and consumers must make massive economic sacrifices to ward off a global climate catastrophe. Not even last November's exposure of e-mails from leading scientists on the alarmist side of the debate — showing them conniving to fudge or suppress data, discredit critics and distort the peer review process — has caused journalists to finally take a skeptical approach to radical environmentalists' doomsaying.



A new study from the MRC's Business & Media Institute documents how ABC, CBS and NBC have been just as strident in their advocacy in the months following "ClimateGate" as they were in the 20 years that preceded the scandal. At the same time, a review of the Media Research Center's archives going back to the late 1980s shows just how strongly reporters have pushed the liberal line on global warming. Here are just some of the many examples:



• "Global warming could mean economic upheaval. It could bring suffering. It could bring starvation....The causes of global warming are no mystery. The biggest culprit is carbon dioxide, or CO2, a bi-product when man burns fossil fuels to run cars or generate electricity....If we fail to act, there may be hell to pay in a hotter world....Global warming is not a fact, just a widely-held theory. The problem is, if man waits for proof, it may be too late."

— Host Don Harrison narrating CNN's primetime Climate In Crisis special, August 1, 1989.



•"As the science editor at Time, I would freely admit that on this issue we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy."

— Time's Charles Alexander at a September 16, 1989 global warming conference at the Smithsonian Institute, as quoted in the October 5 Wall Street Journal.



• "If the world is to head off the risk of global warming, with its danger of massive crop failure, or rising sea levels, or spreading starvation in the poorest countries, then America — the largest producer of the gases that cause global warming — is in the spotlight."

— ABC reporter Ned Potter on World News Tonight, April 7, 1992.



• "Environmentalists see catastrophes of biblical proportions, from droughts to melting ice caps that send sea levels rising."

— Correspondent Barry Petersen on the CBS Evening News, December 1, 1997.



• Karen Kerrigan, Small Business Survival Committee: "To say that the science is conclusive...is actually bunk."

Host Ted Koppel: "I was just going to make the observation that there are still some people who believe in the Flat Earth Society, too, but that doesn't mean they're right."

— Exchange on the December 9, 1997 Nightline.

More at WSJ.COM  and some of the results from Minnesotans 4 Global Warming: Crazy Hippies Celebrate Earthday: