Andrew Revkin’s April 24 piece, about how an energy industry group publicly denied links between emissions and global warming even as their own scientists confirmed such links, is pretty damning, if utterly unsurprising.
This part leaps out:
George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, industry had taken advantage of news media norms requiring neutral coverage of issues, just as the tobacco industry once had.
“They didn’t have to win the argument to succeed,” Mr. Monbiot said, “only to cause as much confusion as possible.”
Note that it isn’t Monbiot who refers to media’s “neutral coverage,” but the Times. In reality, what the industry counted on, successfully, was not neutrality at all, but the corporate media’s entirely artificial balancing of the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists with the patently self-interested views of industries profiting from fossil fuels.
The Times‘ rendering has a tone of “our strength was, ironically, a weakness is this case.” But really it was just their weakness being a weakness. Again.
