Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias (2/25/09) hits the Washington Post for "standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is"--and then spreads some of the blame around:

Meanwhile, one of the Post's main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is the New York Times. So faced with a humiliating abrogation of basic responsibilities by its competitor, does the Times take the opportunity to pour some salt in the wounds? No! Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false-equivalence article painting Will with the same brush as Al Gore. Will's sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore's sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in the New York Times. Hm.

See Extra!: "Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias" (11-12/04) by Jules Boykoff and Maxwell Boykoff.

After eight years of George W. Bush's rule, popular disapproval of policies that had come to be regarded as grave mistakes--from the invasion of Iraq to the response to the economic crisis--drove the Republicans from power.

Unfortunately, the media system has no such built-in check on powerful pundits, as the unchallenged reign of another George W. with a long record of mistakes can attest.

The ongoing controversy over a recent error-plagued climate change column penned by George Will--a Washington Post syndicated columnist whose record of error spans decades--offers a good case study in the impunity of the punditocracy.

As bloggers, media activists and environmentalists were quick to point out, Will made three significant errors in his climate change column, which was published in the Post (2/15/09) and scores of daily newspapers nationwide last week. First, he misrepresented scientific research from the 1970s, claiming that global cooling was then the prevailing concern. Second, he claimed the University of Illinois had found global sea ice was increasing, when in fact the school's researchers found the opposite. Finally, he claimed that U.N. climate researchers have found "no recorded global warming for more than a decade."

In the wake of widespread refutations on blogs, and action alerts by FAIR and Media Matters, the Washington Post received floods of emails complaining about the inaccuracies in Will's column, and the Post's ombud Andy Alexander soon issued a response to a blogger at Think Progress.

Claiming that Will's column had been subject to multiple fact-checks, Alexander addressed only critics' concern about Will's misrepresentation of the University of Illinois's sea ice research, defending Will by citing a University of Illinois statement that, in fact, actually refuted Will's claim.

Given that the position of ombud (a person responsible for responding to reader complaints and upholding accuracy at a media outlet) is the closest thing to a system of accountability that exists at newspapers, the Post ombud's response aptly illustrated the bankruptcy of what passes for accountability at a leading newspaper.

Unfortunately, the erroneous climate change column is not a blip on Will's record. On the issue of climate change alone, FAIR's magazine Extra! documents that Will's history of misquoting data to distort the debate goes back nearly two decades. As FAIR's senior analyst Steve Rendall recently noted on the FAIR Blog, in 1992, Will so grossly misrepresented a Gallup poll on scientists' views on climate change that Gallup took the rare step of issuing a written correction to Will's column.  A decade before that, Will made such a glaring factual error in a column published in Newsweek that the magazine took the unusual step of agreeing to publish a letter by Noam Chomsky (Will managed to block the letter's publication by throwing a temper tantrum.)

And yet this serial distorter of the facts continues to published by more newspapers than any other columnist. In addition to the Post, 367 newspapers publish his column. Why? This is a question newspaper editors should have to answer.

As blogger Jonathan Schwarz recently pointed out, the internet has profoundly changed the landscape of pundit impunity since Will's 1982 temper tantrum. The Washington Post ombud's role in protecting Will's work from the facts may be highly reminiscent of Newsweek's decision to spike Chomsky's letter. However, with the proliferation of blogs devoted to correcting the media record, and the advent of online media activism campaigns that can in a matter of hours generate thousands of reader complaints to editors, concerned members of the public have more tools than ever before to publicly debunk media errors and to push for greater accountability.

In this context, the Post ombud's inadequate response simply added fuel to the campaigns challenging the Post on Will's climate distortions. Yesterday, the presidents of leading environmental groups joined Media Matters in issuing a letter to the newspaper, and FAIR issued a new call for its supporters to contact the Post's ombud (ombudsman@washpost.com)

And given that it is not just the Post but some 368 newspapers nationwide that carry Will's column, the challenge of holding Will accountable is one in which people across the nation have to play a vital role in writing to any newspapers in their own local communities that published Will's error-plagued climate change column.

Given the abundance of online media activism resources, it is not hard to take action to push for greater accountability in one's local newspaper. (Media Matters has a useful application on its website that allows users to easily find out if George Will's column is carried in their local newspaper, and tips on writing letters to the editor can be found in FAIR's media activism kit.)

Given that the corporate media have granted Will impunity for decades now, this accountability is long overdue.

In a blog post about how it must have been "So Much Nicer To Be George Will Before The Internet" (2/17/09), A Tiny Revolution's Jonathan Schwarz looks back over how "on Sunday George Will made things up so he can claim global warming isn't happening" to "a funny story of Noam Chomsky's from the book Understanding Power about a column Will wrote in 1982":

[A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called "Mideast Truth and Falsehood," about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: He said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek--you know, four lines--in which I said, "Will has one statement of fact, it's false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down." Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek "Letters" column. She said: "We're kind of interested in your letter; where did you get those facts?" So I told her, "Well, they're published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971" --which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story. So she looked it up and called me back, and said, "Yeah, you're right, we found it there; okay, we'll run your letter." An hour later she called again and said, "Gee, I'm sorry, but we can't run the letter." I said, "What's the problem?" She said, "Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he's having a tantrum; they decided they can't run it." Well, okay.

Theorizing that these days "it must be hard for Will to get used to bluggs, because he's spent his entire career with total impunity," Schwarz doesn't spare those people responsible for publishing Will's damaging claptrap either: "Two days later, Will and Fred Hiatt, the editor of the Washington Post op-ed page, still won't explain their behavior." See the newest FAIR Action Alert: "Does the Post Fact-Check George Will?: Columnist's Climate Change Denial Distorts Reality" (2/18/09)

In the wake of a George Will column (Washington Post, 2/15/08) attempting to refute the reality of climate change with a string of inaccurate claims, FAIR has an action alert calling on media activists to write to the Washington Post asking them to retract the falsehoods and explain their fact-checking procedures for columnists.

You can post copies of your letters to the Washington Post in the comments section below. Please remember that letters that maintain a civil tone are most effective.

How distorted is the corporate media concept of critical journalism? Just look at Media Matters' write up (2/5/09) of a cable news show that named one commentator its "Muckraker of the Day" for presenting bogus evidence against global warming:

On the February 2 edition of MSBNC's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, anchor David Shuster let syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock tout climate change skeptic Martin Hertzberg's assertion that global warming is not occurring because, in Murdock's words, "the Earth temperature has gone down 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since 1997." Murdock was referencing the following quote from Hertzberg that Murdock included in a February 1 column: "The average temperature of Earth's atmosphere has declined over the last 10 years. From the El Nino Year of 1998 until January 2007, it dropped a quarter of a degree Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit). From January 2007 to the spring of 2008, it dropped a whopping three-quarters of a degree Celsius (1.35 degrees Fahrenheit)." Rather than challenge this use of data, Shuster named Murdock "our Muckraker of the Day" and "congratulat[ed]" Murdock for "stirring the pot."

"But climate scientists warn against cherry-picking yearly temperature averages as purported evidence that global warming is not occurring, especially" Media Matters notes, "from years in which El Niño and La Niña events occurred, as Murdock and Hertzberg did."

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "In Denial on Climate Change: Leading Pundits Reject Science on Global Warming" (5-6/07) by Peter Hart

Just when even the ultimately acerbic political critic Matt Taibbi began (New York Press, 1/14/09) "to lose faith in America's ability to fall for absolutely anything," he notes New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman, "resident of a positively obscene 11,400-square-foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism":

Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a Green Revolution? Well, he'll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95.

While this hypocrisy is galling, Taibbi admits to finding Friedman's writing hilariously bad: "When you tried to actually picture the 'illustrative' figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school." But the wholly unfunny part is "whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors"; see the recent FAIR Action Alert: "Terrorism on the New York Times Op-Ed Page: Friedman Supports Civilian Suffering as 'Education'" (1/14/09)

Critic Mark Howard catches (News Corpse, 1/13/09) new Fox hire Glenn Beck spouting more of his "fabulist" views: "On his radio program, Beck spun a tale of McCarthyistic intrigue that slammed President-elect Barack Obama, his designated climate change adviser Carol Browner and environmentalism in general." Beck's evidence?: "Browner's association with the Global Warming initiatives of an organization called Socialist International, is proof that Obama intends to impose a left-wing dictatorship in America":

Where Beck goes completely off the cognitive cliff is when he asserts that…"almost everyone who does believe in global warming is a socialist. I mean, believes in man-made global warming that now can be fixed and reversed or whatever. And we've got the tools to fix it. Almost everybody who says, 'I've got a plan to fix it' is a socialist."

Global Warming believers like George Bush, John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Newt Gingrich may take umbrage at being called socialists. Beck is also tagging 71 percent of the American people as socialists, including about half of Republicans (Rep:49 percent / Dem: 84 percent /c Ind: 75 percent).

And by the way, that nefarious sounding Socialist International group happens to be "a worldwide enterprise that includes in its membership the ruling Labour Party in Great Britain and the center-left New Democratic Party of Canada."

For a change of pace from his incessant immigrant bashing, CNN's Lou Dobbs recently exclaimed over "unusual storms" and snow in Las Vegas, Southern California and Arizona's mountains. This "unbelievable" evidence has Dobbs wondering: "So what are those folks talking about global warming?"

Posting at Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog (12/19/08), Steve Benen describes how, "to 'discuss' the subject, Dobbs invited CNN meteorologist Chad Myers and Heartland Institute science director Jay Lehr onto the show":

Not surprisingly, Lehr told Dobbs what he wanted to hear, starting with an anecdote about Lehr's sky diving hobby.

LEHR: I have jumped out of a plane in Ohio every month for 31 years, and I track the weather constantly to find out if I can make it out of a plane. And I can tell you, the weather the last ten years hasn't been significantly different than the ten years before that or the ten years before that. It has been -- it is always changes what the weather is about. And to say that it has to do with global warming is really more of a joke than anything else. Why people are so alarmed about it, I have no clue.

DOBBS: You know, that's fascinating.

Before ending the segment, Lehr added that the sun, "not man," warms the planet, and that "right now," we're "going in to cooling rather than warming."

Let's quickly highlight reality here. First, it's not the sun. Second, snowfall on one day in one part of the country does not reflect "climate." Third, an anecdote about sky-diving experimentation is not indicative of climate science. Fourth, though Dobbs apparently forgot to mention it, the Heartland Institute is a conservative think tank subsidized by ExxonMobil, not an independent scientific organization, and Jay Lehr's background is in "groundwater hydrology," not climate science.

Oh, and fifth, this is not "fascinating."

Benen notes that "the bizarre commentary from CNN's Chad Myers wasn't much better. He argued that it's 'arrogant' to think that humans can affect the climate ('Mother nature is so big,' he said) and that people who accept global warming are only looking at 'a hundred years worth of data, not millions of years that the world has been around.'"

Benen wonders, "Why is this man a CNN meteorologist?"  But the sad fact is that a lot of TV weather people think their experience predicting local snowfalls makes them more expert on climate change than actual climate scientists, and often peddle similar nonsense on the air.

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "In Denial on Climate Change: Leading Pundits Reject Science on Global Warming" (5-6/07) by Peter Hart

Today's column by Robert Samuelson (Washington Post, 12/1/08) is a classic of the "why the president-elect must break progressive campaign promises" genre. Usually, of course, the new president should keep such promises:

Obama won the election, and in normal times, his campaign agenda ought to be front and center. But these are not normal times, and what's most important now--as he repeatedly emphasizes--is to prevent the recession from feeding on itself.

And you do that, inevitably, by making sure not to do anything that makes corporations nervous.

Any program to refashion the energy and healthcare sectors--to take two obvious candidates--would be complicated and contentious. Some producers and consumers would win; others would lose. Proposals would create massive uncertainties for businesses and raise the probability of higher costs.

Also on Samuelson's not-to-do list is "speedy action...to support labor unions."

Samuelson ends with a strange claim: "In the long run, we need to discipline our appetite for healthcare.... [but] Obama's first job is to avert an economic freefall." Yeah, that's our problem--we're just gluttons for medicine.

Environmental reporter and activist Harvey Wasserman notices (Columbus Free Press, 11/6/08) that, "as the world media filled with the victory of Barack Obama, a defeat for atomic power in his own back yard sent a Solartopian message to the new administration":

Chicago-area... voters approved by well over two-to-one a referendum asking that "our elected officials in Illinois take steps to phase out nuclear power in the state, replacing it with renewable sources such as wind and solar."... 31,586 (68.3 percent) voters approved the referendum, versus 14,676 (31.7 percent) opposed.

Atomic energy will be one of the most critical issues the new administration will face. Obama was criticized by eco-advocates for taking campaign donations from ["America's largest nuke owner"] Exelon. Both he and Vice President-elect Joe Biden expressed campaign support for atomic power.

But their stance was moderated by Obama's insistence that atomic power be "safe," and by ads he ran in Nevada opposing the Yucca Mountain radioactive waste dump. Some 80 percent of Nevada citizens oppose that project, whose projected cost now runs about $100 billion. By contrast, John McCain vehemently advocated the quick construction of some 45 new reactors.

Declaring that "the issue of how to finance such a 'nuclear renaissance' now overshadows all the rhetoric," Wasserman nevertheless warns that "a strong lobby with a slick, expensive pubic relations campaign is now pushing new nukes"--with the willing help of compliant corporate media; see FAIR's magazine Extra!: Money Is the Real Green Power: The Hoax of Eco-Friendly Nuclear Energy (1-2/08) by Karl Grossman

San Francisco Bay Guardian founder Bruce B. Brugmann posts (11/3/08) on his paper's blog about how "the day before the historic vote on the Clean Energy Initiative (Prop H), under vicious multi-million attack by the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle continued its campaign of decades to censor and marginalize the underlying PG&E/Raker Act scandal story":

PG&E has used its money and muscle to corrupt City Hall and and in effect steal the cheap, clean... public power the city produces from its Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite National Park in violation of the public power mandates of the federal Raker Act.

And so, instead of covering the real story and the blazing battle, the Chronicle ran two front-page stories in effect "greenwashing" the real story....

Hearst ran only one decent story and did not do real followups or get into the PG&E politics of how PG&E and its downtown/landlord allies were working viciously to knock out the progressive candidates who supported H.

Brugmann notes that while Hearst "kept running story after story about about all the jolly good 'green' things PG&E was doing," they were "pointedly refusing... calling the [Pro-H] campaign for relevant comment."

Tim Redmond writes (10/22/08) of how "there aren't many locally-owned independent newspapers left in America," noting that "even the alternative press has become chain-happy.... In... most of the nation's biggest cities, the once-upstart weeklies are owned by big national chains." But, to the great benefit of Northern Californians, the San Francisco Bay Guardian that "Bruce Brugmann and Jean Dibble founded in 1966 is still the paper that Bruce Brugmann and Jean Dibble run in 2008." Redmond relates how, when he "first started writing about sustainable cities in the Guardian, I was 28, the paper was 20, urban environmentalism was still considered an oxymoron in much of the mainstream political world--and we didn't have a name for what we were discussing"--and gives us some more recent history:

Look at Proposition H, the Clean Energy Act on the November ballot. Prop. H is a prescription for sustainable energy; the measure would not only set aggressive goals for renewables, it would shift control of the city's energy agenda away from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and give it to the people of San Francisco....

So where is [Gavin] Newsom, who likes to call himself a green mayor? He's against it. Where are the business leaders in town? Standing with PG&E. Where is the power structure? Fighting to prevent a sustainable energy future for San Francisco.

And the big chain-owned daily newspaper is right there with them.

After "more than a decade" of having "attempted to cast a light on... 'that curriculum of the corporation, by the corporation and for a corporation's profits... [which] shall indeed hasten the rate of destruction of the earth's resources,'" John F. Borowski offers instruction (Common Dreams, 10/20/08) to

Journalists: Expose the agenda of this corrosive curriculum. Enlighten and motivate citizens to action. Parents: Demand that corporate America be tarred and feathered and chased out of the education business.... That your children be given exciting, lifelong science learning.... Filmmakers: Make documentaries and "student friendly" visuals that document mountain-top removal, extinction of species, peak oil, the insanity of an economic system that is based on devouring our own life support system. (We cannot depend on Viacom, General Electric and Disney to provide this on their corporate TV channels.)

In short, Borowski urges us all to do what we can to ensure "the 'science of death' has no place in our schools, our workplace or in our society."

Ecology blog LiveGaia posts another entry (10/8/08) in the annals of corporate media's poor advertising ethics:

Last night in America, after the presidential debate the ads shown were as follows. ABC had Chevron. CBS had Exxon. CNN had the coal lobby. But you know what happened last week? ABC refused to run WeCanSolveIt’s Repower America ad--the ad that takes on this same oil and coal lobby. (more...)

Women In Media & News blogger Miranda Spencer has "some good news for women in journalism: Longtime investigative environmental journalist Marla Cone, who spent nearly two decades at the Los Angeles Times, has just taken the helm as editor in chief at the online publication Environmental Health News." Spencer gives the reinvigorated news site a glowing review (10/1/08):

(more...)