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 [...]
Feb
22
2012
Media's Weird Ethics: Pretending to Be Someone Else Is Worse Than Facilitating Global Catastrophe
By 56 Comments
Dec
07
2009
Forbes Publishes Fiction on Climate Change Debate
By 17 Comments
Forbes.com has an article up called "The Fiction of Climate Science" (12/4/09). Thanks no doubt to a link from Drudge, it's currently one of the website's "top rated," "most popular" and "most emailed" items. "Fiction" is a polite word for what the author, Gary Sutton, does with evidence. Sutton grinds the already well-worn denialist ax about "global cooling"–scientists were predicting an imminent ice age in the 1970s, the argument goes, so why listen to those eggheads now about global warming? See FAIR's Action Alert from last February 18 for a debunking of this myth. But wait! Sutton provides a quote: [...]
Jun
23
2009
Conservative Media Confused by Obama Doctor Story
By 1 Comment
After the conservative site Forbes.com published a story headlined "Obama's Doctor Knocks ObamaCare," it was quickly picked up by the right-wing Drudge Report, where, presumably because of its conservative pedigree, right-wing commentators ran with it as if it were a point scored by the right against the White House. Some conservative blogs suggested that the story showed that Obamaâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s own doctor opposed "socialized" healthcare, (e.g., here and here). On the popular right-wing site National Review Online (NRO), blogger Mark Hemingway joined in, posting three paragraphs of the Forbes report, followed by the triumphant, one-word commentary: "Ouch." Had Hemingway and his [...]
Jan
24
2009
25 Most Influential (or Not) Liberals (or Not)
By 5 Comments
Leave it to Forbes to get someone from the Hoover Institution to do an "in-depth" feature on "The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media" (1/22/09). The results are about as bogus as you might imagine, including a number of people who are not only not liberals, but who are actively loathed by the actual left end of the media spectrum–and the feeling is generally mutual: folks like Fred Hiatt, Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, Christopher Hitchens (did their Nation sub lapse in 1998?), Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews and Andrew Sullivan. Then there are some corporate journalists whose "liberalism" seems [...]
