Capital's Joe Pompeo states his thesis early on:

The idea that there is a media blackout has gained appeal on the left with support from Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann, who said on the September 21 edition of his primetime show on Current TV: "The majority of the media is ignoring the public uprising."

In fact, an (admittedly unscientific) survey of news organizations suggests the protest, despite lacking any clear goal or purpose (that's by design), has been making headlines since it began on September 17.

OK, so Pompeo is trying to show that Olbermann was wrong when he said on September 21 that "the majority of the media" was ignoring the protest. (Michael Moore made a similar statement on the Rachel Maddow Show on September 19.) He does this by doing Nexis and Google searches that include a full week of additional coverage:

A Nexis query for "Occupy Wall Street" yielded 428 results as of press time [i.e, September 28], including 248 items that appeared on blogs, 71 in newspapers, 63 on the wires, 31 in "Web-based publications," 18 as news transcripts, nine as "aggregate news sources," one in the industry trade press and one in a legal news publication. Google News has indexed more than 2,000 articles between September 17 and today.

That is "admittedly unscientific"--not to mention patently unfair.

How much coverage had Occupy Wall Street actually gotten when Olbermann made his claim? Well, Nexis gives me 17 articles from September 16 through September 21 in the "Newspaper Stories, Combined Articles" database with the words "Occupy Wall Street" in them.  Of these, 10 are from overseas papers--from Britain, Australia, Canada, China and Pakistan. Another four are from the St. Joseph News Press, a Missouri paper that reprints tiny items from CNN's wire service. So when Olbermann made his comment, there had been three actual U.S. newspaper stories during five days of demonstrations in the heart of the nation's media capital--the New York Daily News (9/17/11),  Newark Star Ledger (9/18/11) and New York Newsday (9/19/11)--that are at least in-depth enough to mention the name of the event. That's a grand total of 1,047 words.

That Newsday piece, by the way, was headlined "Protests Close Wall Street Second Day." Nothing to see here--move along!

I also got a call last week from Ralph Nader. He was saying how NPR is really just a corporate toady, and that they don't have enough progressive voices on, and I hear that quite a bit. I hear that more from people who actually listen to NPR.

Funny how that works.

The headline ("U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege") and second paragraph suggest something important:

But Dr. Pachauri and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are now under intense scrutiny, facing accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest from climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists. Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, called for Dr. Pachauri's resignation last week.

So what's the status of these charges? You have to read a few more paragraphs until you're told that "several of the recent accusations have proved to be half-truths," and that the "general consensus among mainstream scientists is that the errors are in any case minor and do not undermine the report’s conclusions." Well, shouldn't that be made clear from the start?

There are two scientific criticisms made about the last IPCC report--one has been found baseless, while the other was an actual mistake, though the magnitude of the error seems to have been overstated. But that's apparently good enough to craft a whole story around the "IPCC Under Siege" theme, and to collect quotes from the likes of leading denier Christopher Monckton: "The chair is an Indian railroad engineer with very substantial direct and indirect financial vested interests in the matters covered in the climate panel’s report. What on earth is he doing there?"

Monckton is, among other things, "the chief policy adviser to the Science and Public Policy Institute"-- a climate change denying think tank that apparently does not disclose its funders (SpinProfiles). Yet apparently the Times sees Monckton as a credible source for critiquing the head of the IPCC for failing to disclose his financial ties.

Almost two weeks ago, the Sunday Times, a British newspaper, "broke" the story that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had made significant errors in its 2007 report on the impacts of global warming....

The report stated that there was a very high likelihood that glaciers in the Himalayas would disappear by 2035 if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Three days after the Times published its article, the IPCC essentially admitted that this was an error (while glaciers in the region are melting, they are unlikely to vanish that quickly) and apologized (pdf) for the "poorly substantiated" claim.

In the days after the story first broke, the New York Times and the Washington Post each ran one print article about the Himalayan glaciers error. The Christian Science Monitor, now published online, produced one piece, and the Associated Press and Bloomberg sent a couple of articles over the wire.

Unfortunately, that’s about it. Meanwhile, outlets in the U.K., India and Australia have been eating the American media's lunch, churning out reams of commentary and analysis. Journalists in the U.S. should take immediate steps to redress that oversight.

But the New York Times never reported the IPCC's claim that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 before publishing the debunking article. The Washington Post mentioned it in a story (11/22/09) that focused on the Indian environmental minister's rejection of the claim. The Christian Science Monitor had one piece (11/5/99) on melting Himalayan glaciers that quoted a source saying "the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high"--but this was not a quote from the IPCC report, which wouldn't appear for another eight years, but from the International Commission on Snow and Ice, which was part of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences.

None of these papers, then, thought that the IPCC's statement that the Himalayan glaciers would likely melt by 2035 was in itself worth mentioning, let alone basing a story around. So how much effort should the same papers spend reporting on the withdrawal of this claim? That depends on whether you think melting glaciers, or scientific misstatements about melting glaciers, are the bigger threat to humanity.

You see the same emphasis on science process trivia over the actual phenomena scientists are studying in a British Guardian story headlined "Leaked Climate Change Emails Scientist 'Hid' Data Flaws" (2/1/10), which is no doubt getting a lot of U.S. traffic today via a link from Drudge. In the fifth paragraph, the story reveals that contrary to the implication of the headline and subhead ("Key study by East Anglia professor Phil Jones was based on suspect figures"), the story actually has no bearing on the reality of climate change:

The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.

And how do they do that, exactly?

Wang was cleared of scientific fraud by his university, but new information brought to light today indicates at least one senior colleague had serious concerns about the affair.

So essentially this story reveals that before a scientist was cleared of suspicions of scientific wrongdoing, he was suspected of scientific wrongdoing. Stop the presses!

That a respectable paper like the Guardian would trumpet this as an important scoop--and that a media watchdog like CJR would be calling for more in this vein--is a testimony to how deeply the "Climategate" hackers have distorted the discussion over the most important environmental issue of our lifetimes. See the brand-new issue of Extra!: "'Climategate' Overshadows Copenhagen: Media Regress to the Bad Old Days of False Balance" (2/10) by Julie Hollar.