There's a popular verb in headlines about climate researcher Peter Gleick's admission that he used trickery to get damning documents out of the climate change-denialist group the Heartland Institute: "Activist Says He Lied to Obtain Climate Papers" (New York Times, 2/21/12); "Scientist Peter Gleick Admits He Lied to Get Climate Documents" (L.A. Times, 2/21/12); "Climate Researcher Says He Lied to Obtain Heartland Documents" (WashingtonPost.com, 2/21/12).

What you wouldn't gather from all these pants-on-fire condemnations is that there is a long and honorable tradition, from Nellie Bly feigning madness to expose mistreatment of the mentally ill to the Chicago Sun-Times' Mirage Tavern corruption lab, of investigative journalists using false identities to gather information--when the public interest is clear, and there's no other way to get the story. While it's not possible to give Gleick ethical absolution without knowing more details of what he did, it's clear that Heartland was not about to give up incriminating documents to anyone they thought would make them public--and there is hardly a story where the public interest is more obvious than in documenting efforts to block action to stop catastrophic global climate change.

However, as Aaron Swartz pointed out in Extra! (3-4/08), in recent years corporate media have largely abandoned the tactic of undercover reporting, largely in response to the Food Lion case, in which ABC was sued (ultimately unsuccessfully) for having its reporters get grocery store jobs without revealing that they planned use their positions to gather evidence of unsafe food handling. Bizarrely, many journalistic observers seemed to find Food Lion's position persuasive--an ethical stance that is great for corporate malefactors but terrible for the public interest, since it would virtually insure that reporters can never be eyewitness to workplace abuses that happen in employees-only areas.

Thus when Ken Silverstein (Harper's, 7/07) pretended to represent a Central Asian dictatorship to document lobbying groups' eagerness to work for human rights abusers, he got a chorus of scoldings from ethical arbiters like Howard Kurtz (Washington Post, 6/25/07): "No matter how good the story, lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects." In this peculiar moral universe, pretending to work for a ruthless dictatorship is every bit as ethically questionable as actually volunteering to do so.

And that's the standard that's being applied to Gleick (Climate Central, 2/21/12): The New York Times' Andy Revkin (Dot Earth, 2/20/12) charged that "Gleick's use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others." Wrote Bryan Walsh for Time.com (2/20/12): "No reputable investigative reporter would be permitted to do what Gleick did. It's almost certainly a firing offense." According to Houston Chronicle science editor Eric Berger (2/21/12), Gleick "has unquestionably ceded some of the high ground scientists held in the climate science debate. It will not be easily won back."

Funny, you'd think that climate scientists held the high ground in the climate science debate because of, you know, science--the science that shows that we're making catastrophic changes to the Earth's atmosphere?

Holding that Gleick's sins are much worse than Heartland's--I predict you will see virtually nothing from now on in establishment outlets about the contents of the Heartland memos--is a bizarre moral proposition, equivalent to holding that a child should starve to death rather than a loaf of bread be stolen. (Do bear in mind a fact that seems entirely absent from the media discussion of global warming, which is that large numbers of people, many of them children, are already dying as a result of lack of action on climate change.) But the most maddening thing is that these same media outlets are entirely willing to accept misrepresentation and illegally gathered information as legitimate parts of journalism--when they are used to advance a right-wing agenda, including climate change denial.

As Exhibit A, look at James O'Keefe, who famously and proudly passed off his partner as a prostitute while secretly videotaping ACORN staffers. Who in the debate over O'Keefe's work took the position that because the colleague was not actually a prostitute, the entire project was unethical and therefore all of his videotapes should be ignored? The actual objection to O'Keefe's work (Extra!, 4/10) was that he deceived the public--misleadingly editing his footage to create false impressions, including the popular delusion that O'Keefe had gone into ACORN offices wearing an outlandish Superfly costume. Nevertheless, he got overwhelmingly positive coverage from right-wing and centrist news outlets alike, with the result that his mendacious reporting had the successful result of helping to bring ACORN down.

And on the issue of climate change itself, corporate news outlets devoted endless attention to the "Climategate" story (Extra!, 2/10), the selective release of scientists' private emails, evidently obtained through hacking. This release was designed to create the appearance of scientific impropriety where none existed, as every inquiry into the controversy has determined (FAIR Blog, 4/19/10). In a journalistic failure that will likely surpass the selling of the Iraq invasion and the overlooking of the housing bubble in terms of human devastation, media allowed this malicious hoax to upend the climate change discussion (FAIR Blog, 2/2/10), turning the scientific consensus on global warming once again into an open question and effectively taking real action to reduce greenhouse gasses off the political table.

Climate Central's round-up of reactions to the Heartland/Gleick story cites Forbes.com's Warren Meyer (2/21/12)--identified not as a prominent global warming denier (he's got a video called Catastrophe Denied, for Pete's sake), but merely as one of "several commentators" making the point that people on both sides in the "climate debate" have caused it to become "unethical and dangerous." Meyer is quoted, seemingly approvingly: "When we convince ourselves that those who disagree with us are not people of goodwill who simply reach different conclusions from the data, but are instead driven by evil intentions and nefarious sources of funding, then it becomes easier to convince oneself that the ends justify the means."

Here's what the Heartland documents actually show (Deep Climate, 2/14/12): The leadership of those who reject climate science are not people of goodwill who simply reach different conclusions from the data, but instead are driven by nefarious sources of funding. If you want to call that "evil," when you're talking about working to prevent action to avoid worldwide disaster, I think you're on solid moral ground.

Edit: Placed Eric Berger at the right paper.

New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer (2/2/12) accurately reports how Republicans want to frame the disputed over the Keystone XL pipeline. But she does almost nothing to challenge that framing.

Under the headline, "For GOP, Pipeline Is Central to Agenda," Steinhauer explains:

Republicans are framing Keystone as an urgent jobs and energy project at a time of high unemployment and creeping gasoline prices, and trying to portray Mr. Obama as giving in to hard-left environmentalists in an election year at the expense of addressing both.

Instead of challenging that narrative, the Times bolstered it, alluding to what Republican presidential candidates are saying about Keystone and quoting from Keystone-supporting Democrats.

"This week, Democrats moved to blunt the Keystone attacks," the Times went on--which merely set up more quotes from potentially Keystone-friendly Democrats like Senator Harry Reid, who wants the project to keep the oil in the U.S.

The Times then went back to Republican PR:

For Republicans, the pipeline is a political trifecta. It unites most of their party and divides the Democrats. It is also fairly easy to explain to voters, and it hits on the key concerns of many Americans: jobs, energy independence and fear of economic competition with China, which Republicans have said will be the recipient of the Canadian oil without the Keystone plan.

You can challenge that "trifecta," but the Times mostly passed on that option. The only hint of skepticism comes late in the article:

The number of jobs that could be created by the Keystone expansion--supporters say 20,000--is disputed. But many companies and labor unions around the country were counting on the expansion and had already made materials or hired workers to gear up.

The numbers are disputed. How so?

As we've talked about before, this is arguably the key issue here. An outside estimate from Cornell says 2,500-4,000 jobs. The State Department says 5 or 6 thousand.

It's not difficult to cite these numbers, or to ask Keystone proponents to explain where they're getting their much higher estimates (hint: from the company). This is especially important in a piece about how this issue will be an important part of the Republican presidential campaign strategy.

The Times notes near the end:

A wild card is whether workers invested in the project will serve as an echo chamber for the Republicans' criticism.

Today the  New York Times certainly served that function.

Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel has a column in the Washington Post today (1/3/12) outlining the three important election issues to watch--and one of them is about how the press covers the process:

Third, the media's obsession with false equivalence: How the election is covered will almost certainly have a measurable impact on its outcome.

The New York Times' Paul Krugman describes what he's witnessing as "post-truth politics," in which right-leaning candidates can feel free to say whatever they want without being held accountable by the press. There may be instances in which a candidate is called out for saying something outright misleading; but, as Krugman notes, "if past experience is any guide, most of the news media will feel as though their reporting must be 'balanced.'" For too many journalists, calling out a Republican for lying requires criticizing a Democrat too, making for a media age where false equivalence--what Eric Alterman has called the mainstream media's "deepest ideological commitment"--is confused, again and again, with objectivity.

That reminded me of a piece I read two days before in the Washington Post (1/1/12), where reporter David Nakamura discussed Barack Obama's looming decision on the Keystone tar sands pipeline, one of "several potential political landmines littering his playing field":

Republicans successfully added a provision to the two-month payroll tax cut extension mandating that Obama make a politically sensitive decision on the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline by the end of February. He had hoped to delay a decision on the project--which Republicans have said will create jobs but environmentalists have said would harm natural resources--until after a federal environmental review is completed in 2013.

As is the convention, both sides are represented here. But does this make much sense? The problem with Republicans claims about job creation is that they are, according to many experts, wildly inflated. That would be important to note in a piece discussing the "political landmines" here.

The flipside, we're told, is that "environmentalists" think the project might "harm natural resources." That could mean anything--pollution from a spill, perhaps. Or it might be a reference to the greater threat from climate change. So the "natural resource" would be the planet Earth.  "Balanced" journalism treats inflated jobs claims and the fate of the planet equally.

Frontrunner-of-the-moment Rick Perry is getting a lot of press for his performance at the recent Republican debate--especially because he's standing by his belief that Social Security is a "monstrous lie" and a Ponzi scheme, and that climate change is an untested theory advanced by corrupt, discredited scientists.

You can call such ideas a lot of things. "False" or "untrue," for example, would work. But a lot of reporters characterized Perry's performance in positive terms. In today's New York Times (9/9/11), Michael Shear writes that Perry

made clear in his first national appearance that he would campaign as an unabashed Southern conservative who is unafraid to speak bluntly, would double-down on controversial statements and planned to shrug off the concerns of the Republican establishment.

Shear later added that "Perry did not back down Wednesday night from his assertion that Social Security was a failure, even in the face of direct criticism by Mr. Romney."

"Unabashed," "unafraid," not backing down--these are all more or less positive descriptions.

Likewise, on NBC Nightly News (9/8/11), Andrea Mitchell said: "Perry proved he could throw a punch and take one. And he was unapologetic about attacking Social Security as a monstrous lie."

So he's not only a fearlessly blunt speaker, he's also an unapologetic punch-thrower. This is the kind of coverage the Perry campaign would probably pay for. Yes, there are pieces here and there that point out that, you know, Social Security isn't actually a massive scam. On the other hand, Washington Post liberal Ruth Marcus writes today (9/9/11): "On the substance, Perry’s point about Social Security-as-Ponzi scheme has some grounding in reality." She gets around to criticizing him, but that's a lot of ground to cede to a falsehood.

As Greg Marx notes at CJR,  the media designation of certain pieces as "factchecks" is strange because one might logically conclude that run-of-the-mill articles don't dwell on checking the facts of politicians (a conclusion that would largely be a correct one). He points to a CBS News piece on Perry and Social Security that quotes other Republicans disagreeing with his stance. Readers are apparently being asked to believe either Karl Rove or Rick Perry on the issue. That's a lot to ask of anyone.

In case you were wondering whether Irene sparked any discussions of climate change, here's a moment from the panel discussion on ABC's This Week (8/30/11):

RON BROWNSTEIN (National Journal): Do we want to get into a global warming and a hurricanes discussion?

DONNA BRAZILE (Democratic Strategist): No.

BROWNSTEIN: I mean, I don't know if we want to open that door.

Let that serve as a reminder to read Neil deMause's piece from the last issue of Extra!

This was a laugh line, so I guess take it for what it's worth.  On the other hand, Cokie Roberts seemed to be serious when she said this about George W. Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina:

It was surprising to me, his reaction, because his father's example with Hurricane Andrew had been such that you would think that he would, you know, understand that he needed to get out front on Katrina. But in his case, a huge part of his appeal post September 11th, was that he was keeping the country safe. And suddenly, people didn't feel safe. They weren't safe. They were in a very dangerous situation.

Back in reality, Bush's job approval rating was hovering around 50 percent for about 18 months prior to Katrina--which would suggest quite a number of people weren't sure about Bush's "appeal" before that storm hit. More jarring, though, is to hear someone say that people liked Bush after the 9/11 attacks because "he was keeping the country safe." Really?

The Washington Post had a piece yesterday (6/9/11) on Mitt Romney's views on global warming. It serves as a reminder that Republican political candidates are under enormous pressure from the right-wing base of the party on this issue--any politician who's ever suggested that climate change is a problem, or backed efforts to address it, is in trouble.

This is an important thing to point out.  But that doesn't mean the Post thinks climate change is important. See the article's lead sentence:

It seemed like a straightforward question on a second-tier issue: Would Mitt Romney disavow the science behind global warming?

Is the fate of the planet a "second-tier issue"?

Romney's views--"he believes the world is getting warmer and that humans are contributing to that pattern," explains the Post--aren't pleasing the far right,  whom the Post gives ample space to vent:

"Bye-bye, nomination," Rush Limbaugh said Tuesday on his radio talk show after playing a clip of Romney's climate remark. "Another one down. We're in the midst here of discovering that this is all a hoax. The last year has established that the whole premise of man-made global warming is a hoax, and we still have presidential candidates that want to buy into it."

Then came the Club for Growth, which issued a white paper criticizing Romney. "Governor Romney's regulatory record as governor contains some flaws," the report said, "including a significant one--his support of 'global warming' policies."

And Conservatives4Palin.com, a blog run by some of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s more active supporters, posted an item charging that Romney is "simpatico" with President Obama after he "totally bought into the man-made global warming hoax."

Prominent climate change "skeptic" Christopher Horner from the Competitive Enterprise Institute is also quoted. There's never any indication that what these people are saying is nonsense--perhaps because this is a story about politics, and facts shouldn't get in the way.

The closest thing to that kind of balancing perspective is when the Post pointed out that public opinion is divided:

Public opinion is politicized on the issue. A March Gallup poll found that 32 percent of Republicans think the effects of global warming are already being felt and 36 percent believe the rise in the Earth’s temperatures is caused by humans, while 67 percent say the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated in the news.

The same survey found the opposite trend on the other side of the political fence. Sixty-two percent of Democrats polled said the effects of global warming have begun, and 71 percent said humans are causing the rising temperatures, while 22 percent think the situation is exaggerated. Among independents, there was a fairly even split on those questions.

I'm not sure "politicized" is the most useful term to use here. If many more Republicans believe that Iraq had WMDs, or that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, or that the Earth is flat, are such views "politicized"--or simply inaccurate?

I was intrigued to see this headline at the Guardian's website yesterday:

Has Scientific American jumped the shark on climate change? That's the contention of Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm (10/26/10), who accuses the magazine of treating human-caused global climate change as an open question.

Romm points to an article by Michael Lemonick (11/10) about Judith Curry, a climate scientist whose critiques of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are often cited by non-climate scientists who (unlike Curry herself) deny that people are dangerously warming the Earth. The articles seems to leave the impression that the truth on climate change is somewhere in the middle:

Climate scientists feel embattled by a politically motivated witch hunt, and in that charged environment, what Curry has tried to do naturally feels like treason--especially since the skeptics have latched onto her as proof they have been right all along. But Curry and the skeptics have their own cause for grievance. They feel they have all been lumped together as crackpots, no matter how worthy their arguments.

So there are "worthy...arguments" against the idea that human alteration of the atmosphere is causing the planet to warm up? If so, Scientific American is sitting on the scientific scoop of the decade.

Perhaps worse, the article was accompanied by an online poll to determine, in Lemonick's words, whether Curry is "a heroic whistle-blower, speaking the truth when others can't or won't," or someone who has "gone off the scientific deep end, hurling baseless charges at a group of scientists who are doing their best to understand the complexities of Earth's climate." Among the specific questions the Web poll asks is,  "What is causing climate change?"

There's something strange about any kind of poll on questions of science, as if the laws of nature responded to public opinion. But the adjective often used alongside of Web polls--which record the opinions of a non-random selection of Web surfers--is "unscientific." So why is Scientific American using one to gauge opinion on climate questions?

Stranger still, the magazine's website also features an "Energy Poll" conducted "in association with" the Shell oil company. It's hard to say whether this is an ad disguised as content or content that is underwritten and influenced by a self-interested advertiser--but either way, Scientific American has a major ethical problem.  Simply taking money for science journalism from a company with a critical interest in denying science is inherently problematic--just as it's dubious for Nova, the closest equivalent to Scientific American on TV, to be dependent on funding from climate change deniers (FAIR Blog, 9/14/10).

Scientific American has a proud tradition, and signs that it's falling short on the most critical scientific issue of our time are distressing. I've been concerned about the magazine's take on climate since last year's article, "Another Century of Oil? Getting More From Current Reserves" (10/09), which discussed techniques for pumping ever more oil without ever mentioning climate change. It was written by oil company executive Leonardo Maugeri.

"Aren't there things Obama & Co. could have done differently?" Howard Fineman writes in the current issue of Newsweek (9/20/10).  "Election Day is still seven weeks away--but it's not too early for a 'pre-mortem.'"

No, never too early--especially since Fineman's column offers the same advice corporate media pundits have been giving to Democratic politicians  for at least the past 30 years: Move to the right. "Obama's 2008 victory was a personal one," Fineman quotes Bill Clinton adviser Bill Galston. "It wasn’t a vote for a more expansive view of the role and reach of government." You may have thought that enacting healthcare reform was a central promise of the Obama campaign, but no--apparently we just voted for him to hang out with us.

Instead, writes Fineman, "Obama--an overachiever, the guy who fills up a second blue book on the extra credit question--tried to do it all." For example, he foolishly tried to address the global catastrophe of climate change, pushing the House to vote for a cap-and-trade bill: "With this one early vote, the president exhausted his chits with Blue Dog, swing-state moderates and the coal-staters, who were then reluctant to help him on other matters." If only he had saved those chits!

If this doesn't make much sense to you, then you may suffer from another malady Fineman diagnoses in Obama: He hasn't "seemed all that curious about what makes Democratic insiders tick." That's certainly not Fineman's problem.

PBS ombud Michael Getler has thankfully expanded on his "I trust Nova" response to concerns that public TV's leading science program might be influenced by its climate change-denying funders (FAIR Blog, 9/8/10). In a more extensive response to those who thought they detected the fingerprints of oil tycoon David Koch (and industry giant ExxonMobil) in a Nova broadcast, Getler (9/13/10) suggests that those critics might have reason to be suspicious.

Getler points to the interconnection of Koch's gifts to Nova and to the Smithsonian museum, which has a David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins that portrays climate change as a driving force behind our species' evolution. The curator of this exhibit, Rick Potts, appears in Nova's "Becoming Human" program (rerun 8/31/10), making a similar case. As Getler notes:

The segment did leave you with both a subtle message and the feeling that climate change may not be so bad, or bad at all. Of course, it may be very bad and there is nothing about that in the episode.

I’m not judging the science here, or even the program itself. But the three-way link between Potts, the Smithsonian and David Koch are not explained in the program or online and, somehow, they should have been, even though this was a re-broadcast. Failure to do so adds to the question of whether any red flags went up inside Nova last year or this year or whether they just didn’t want to call attention to those connections.

Nova remains unapologetic and indeed seems indignant that anyone would question the integrity of their science reporting. In a statement to Getler, the program responds to Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm, who had criticized the "Becoming Human" series:

By taking the final few minutes of Nova's show out of context, as if the episode were intended to be a major exploration of humanity’s future rather than its past, Dr. Romm has distorted Nova's efforts to engage in much-needed, responsible, popularization of a scientific field that is constantly under siege from doubters of evolution.

The reference to "doubters of evolution" makes one wonder: What would people say if the top few of Nova's most generous supporters included the two most prominent funding sources for "intelligent design" advocacy? Surely the mere fact that a science program was bankrolled by proponents of pseudo-science would raise eyebrows. And if there creationist shibboleths found their way into Nova's programming, however subtly, there would be howls of protest.

Koch's denial of climate change is no less a pseudo-science than creationism. The big difference is that evolution, unlike global warming, is not a catastrophe that requires urgent action, so its skeptics are much less dangerous--and have pockets not nearly so deep as those who benefit from not taking action against global warming.

PBS's Nova is taking money from one of the biggest bankrollers of climate change denial--and,  surprise surprise, the resulting programming tells viewers not to worry about climate change.  But PBS's ombud doesn't see this as a conflict of interest--because Nova is a "consistently first-rate program," and he trusts it.

Nova's conflict of interest was highlighted out by Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm (9/7/10), who had previously caught the Smithsonian promoting strange climate science after getting a grant from oil billionaire David Koch (Climate Progress, 4/1/10). Koch, who's a major funder of propaganda rejecting the science of climate change, is also one of the main underwriters of the popular PBS science program Nova--which is in itself a case of strange bedfellows.  (Another major sponsor of Nova is ExxonMobil, the other top funder of science-denial in support of  oil industry profits.)

With the New Yorker's Jane Mayer (8/30/10) calling attention to the Koch family's political donations--and mentioning the fear that David Koch's contributions are affecting the Smithsonian's exhibits--people naturally paid more attention to the donor credit for David Koch on a recent Nova rerun (8/31/10) called "Becoming Human." What raised more than a few eyebrows was the program's enthusiasm for climate change as a  driver of human evolution--with a not-so-subtle suggestion that we should bear this in mind in our current era of rapidly shifting weather:

Narrator: It is a simple but revolutionary idea: Human evolution is nature's experiment with versatility. We're not adapted to any one environment or climate, but to many; we are creatures of climate change.

Geographer Mark Maslin: I think we should actually look to our proud ancestry and how we evolved in East Africa and say: "That's how we survived that. We can survive the future, because we are that creature, because we are that smart."

Note that Maslin is not actually a climate-change denier--he's really a strong advocate for immediate action to restrict carbon emissions--but Nova quotes him as though he takes the don't-worry-be-happy stance adopted by...well, people like David Koch. Why is that?

As usual, PBS insiders take the position that where you get your money from is absolutely irrelevant, once again rejecting the entire rationale for public broadcasting: "Nova, like all WGBH programs, maintains complete, independent editorial control of its content," Nova executive producer Paula Apsell told PBS ombud Michael Getler. Getler, for his part, declares that "one rarely knows when or how, if at all, influence works its way," and that "as a viewer of what strikes me and a lot of others as a consistently first-rate program, I trust Nova"--a hands-off stance that would seem to reject the entire rationale for having an ombud.

PBS's position echoes the Smithsonian's--David Koch is "very interested in the content, but completely hands off," museum director Cristián Samper told the New Yorker. And that's Koch's position as well; asked by Archeology magazine (2/17/09) if he was involved in the editorial content of Nova's evolutionary programming, he replied:  "No, I am not. I've been following the Nova series ever since it first came on the air. I'm a great admirer."

In that same interview, though, Koch describes a visit to Olduvai Gorge to inspect the Leakey digs, which he also bankrolls: "When I got there they had discovered a Hominin's bones. They left them in the earth, waiting for me to arrive. And then when I arrived, they let me pull them out of the ground, which was kind of fun."

Presumably the Leakeys let him extract those bones not because of his paleontological expertise, but because they knew it would make a major donor happy. Nova also knows that downplaying the dangers of climate change would make its major donors happy--and it aired a program that presented climate change as a positive force for good. If you want to believe that that's a coincidence--well, all you have to do is trust Nova.

Newsweek's "environmental issue" has an article (5/28/10) by correspondent Stefan Theil declaring climate change to be "Uncertain Science."  Giving the Reader's Digest condensed version of the denialist case, Theil refers to "e-mails and documents suggesting that researchers cherry-picked data and suppressed rival studies to play up global warming"--without mentioning that after sensationalistic media stories suggested a scientific conspiracy, subsequent academic investigations cleared the researchers of wrongdoing (Extra!, 2/10 ;  FAIR Blog, 4/19/10).

He talks about a U.S. scientist "under investigation for allegedly using exaggerated climate data to obtain public funds"--without mentioning that the scientist, Michael Mann, is being investigated by Virginia's Tea Party-aligned Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, whom the Washington Post has described as having "declared war on reality" (Climate Progress, 5/7/10).  Theil claims that there is a real scientific debate "over the extent and time frame" of CO2's greenhouse effect--and glosses over the fact that the actual debate in climate science circles is over whether the consensus predictions have underestimated how much the Earth will warm as a result of the burning of fossil fuels (Climate Progress, 5/31/10).

I suppose none of this should be surprising coming from a reporter who attacked Germany's "green technophobia" as a "sinister" and "disturbing" relic of the country's "powerful back-to-nature movements" and its "extreme desire for stability" (Newsweek, 7/18/09; Extra!, 2/10).

The New York Times' May 2 Week in Review section leads with a piece from Jad Mouawad headlined "The Spill vs. a Need to Drill." You get a sense of the tone of the piece early on: Readers learn that "emotions are running high" as the disaster gets worse. And this has led to predictable consequences:

Beyond railing at BP, the company that owns the well now spewing oil, some environmental groups have demanded an end to offshore exploration.

If someone's "emotion"-based argument is reduced to "railing," it's obviously not to be taken seriously. The Times states its position pretty succinctly: Nothing is going to stop offshore drilling, for simple reasons:

The country needs the oil--and the jobs.

Much has changed since 1969. The nation's demand for oil has surged, rising more than 35 percent over the past four decades, while domestic production has declined by a third. Oil imports have doubled, and the United States now buys more than 12 million barrels of oil a day from other countries, about two-thirds of its needs.

While it's certainly true that the country consumes more oil now than it did in 1969 (it would be surprising if that weren't the case, since the U.S. population was two-thirds as big as it is today), new drilling would provide a relatively small amount of oil, and would have little impact on the much-discussed need to break the grip of "foreign oil."

The article also offers concern about global warming as a rationale for continued offshore drilling--because allowing such drilling might help win Republican support for a climate bill.

The Times goes on to note that, "Some in the environmental movement believe that public outrage will also push the government to aggressively develop alternatives to oil." This sets up a quote from an environmentalist--which is then challenged by the reporter:

But developing credible, cheap and abundant alternatives to oil will take many decades, and in the meantime, cars need gasoline and planes need kerosene. The United States is still the world’s top oil consumer by far. Even as China grows, the United States consumes twice as much oil.

Is there any alternative, asks Mouawad? Not for decades, says the American Enterprise Institute's Samuel Thernstrom, and in the meanwhile we've got to drill--leaving the last word to the ExxonMobil-backed think tank.

I find it very peculiar that the New York Times can publish an editorial observer piece about unheeded warnings--"Cassandra, the Ignored Prophet of Doom, Is a Woman for Our Times," by Adam Cohen (4/19/10)--without once mentioning climate change.

The piece cites various foretold disasters--Bernie Madoff, sexual abuse by priests, the financial meltdown, September 11, New Orleans--without mentioning the looming catastrophe whose impact seems likely to eclipse all of these. (One of China's top economic planners recently predicted that the economic disruption caused by global warming "would be equivalent to that of the two world wars and the Great Depression combined.") Cohen does mention Al Gore as the originator of the phrase "inconvenient truth," but recalling which truth Gore was referring to is left as an exercise for the reader.

But perhaps this omission is not so strange, considering that more than half of the paper's science writers are reportedly doubters when it comes to climate change (FAIR Blog, 3/17/10).  That would explain why the Times put stories questioning climate scientists on the front page (11/21/09) while relegating reports clearing them of the charges against them to brief items in the back pages (3/31/10, 4/15/10).  Maybe in this instance, the Times believes, Cassandra happens to be wrong.

Via Climate Progress (3/16/10), Scientific American guest blogger John Horgan (3/16/10) makes a disturbing claim:

Two sources at the Science Times section of the New York Times have told me that a majority of the section's editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity.

Now, reviews of climate research literature show universal support for the notion that human-caused climate change is happening  (Nature, 12/3/04), and surveys of climate scientists find the same unanimity (Science Daily, 1/19/09). Major scientific organizations around the world have endorsed the consensus of the climate research field, and have expressed alarm at the dangers to humanity posed by climate change.

So if a majority of the staff of Science Times nonetheless doubts that human-caused climate change is a real danger, that means one of two things: Either the journalists at one of the nation's most visible sources of science news consider scientists to be a dubious lot who may well not know what they're talking about, or those journalists have not been paying attention to what the scientists are saying. Either way, it's troubling.

And the response by the New York Times science editor Laura Chang in the comments section was hardly reassuring:

I must say your sentence about the science staff doesn't make sense. There are more than 20 people on the Science Desk of the Times, and no one has ever taken a poll of their positions on human-induced global warming. As far as I know, everyone here who covers climate--including our neighbors in the environment pod, who provide the bulk of this coverage these days--keeps an open mind about the evidence.

If "keeps an open mind" means what it usually does, then the people who cover climate for the New York Times think the jury is still out on whether climate scientists should be believed when they say humans are causing a global climate disaster. Talk about your serious threats to humanity.