That's not the way corporate media handled the illegally taped cell phone call between Newt Gingrich, John Boehner and other Republican congressmembers in which Gingrich violated the terms of a ethics sanction by strategizing about how to minimize the charges against him. In that case, they focused on the illegality of the taping--and the unauthorized leaking of the tape by Rep. Jim McDermott (D.-Wash.).

That's also not how the press handled the case of  Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Michael Gallagher, who illegally listened to voicemails at the Chiquita corporation in pursuit of a series of stories that charged the company with involvement in bribery, fraud and the abuse of workers. Again, the wrongdoing that was considered newsworthy was the reporter's, not the target of his investigation.

It's hard to imagine what ethical code would tell journalists to ignore information about corporate skullduggery or congressional ethics violations if it was obtained through illicit means, but if it concerns the academic politics of climate scientists--dig in!

Say you're a harried cable news producer with 24 gaping hours to fill with finished material every day of the week. Say you're constantly in need of articulate guests to offer a diversity of viewpoints. How do you do it?

One way is to take up offers like this one from the PR folks representing Marc Morano. Refresher: Morano was formerly an aid to climate-change-denier-in-chief James Inhofe (GOP senator from Oklahoma), now heads misinformation clearinghouse ClimateDepot.com, and is still the chief supplier of talking points to the climate-denial camp.

Hiskes' quotes from the PR release are enlightening for how skillfully they play into the false balance so key to corporate reportage:

Here’s your anti-Gore Global Warming Expert who offers the science to counteract partisan and ideologically driven Environmental entities and issues....

If you believe most, or all, of the global warming dogma, you may use Marc as your "counter guest" to offer a lively, fair and balanced discussion to your audience. If you are a skeptic of the current doctrine, Marc can aid your program by clearing up the deception with the facts.

The really troubling part comes in the release's list of news organizations that have fallen for this nonsense, boasting that Morano "has made international news" on "CNN, Fox News Channel's the O'Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes, BBC TV, the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post."

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias: Creating Controversy Where Science Finds Consensus" (11-12/04) by Jules Boykoff and Maxwell Boykoff

Lomborg made his name in 2001 by publishing The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, a 540-page attack on conventional green wisdom. It suggested that supposed environmental crises--including global warming--were "phantom problems" drummed up by the environmental old guard to serve its own ends. That prompted Grist to respond with A skeptical look at The Skeptical Environmentalist, a special series in which experts scrutinized Lomborg's claims in their fields.

Did much debunkery ensue? Oh yes it did. Nobel-winning Climatologist Stephen Schneider exposed Lomborg's selective use of statistics in his climate analysis. Energy expert David Nemtzow called out Lomborg for knocking down a straw man of fossil fuel scarcity. Biologist E.O. Wilson blasted holes in Lomborg's "stop worrying" analysis of species extinction. And more.

As Schneider complained eight years ago, the most vexing question might be how Lomborg keeps getting such high-profile attention. And that prompts a question about the New York Times' rationale for going to Lomborg for this essay. He is, basically, a climate change denier. Granting him space on the NYT op-ed page is yet another example of the media treating a scientific matter as just another political topic fit for debate.

By way of comparison, Hiskes "wonders, would they grant the same privilege to the wackos who think HIV doesn’t cause AIDS?"

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.