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:

In 1974, the National Science Board announced: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end…leading into the next ice age."

First of all, this isn't one quote--this is two quotes from two separate National Science Board documents stapled together. The first comes from a 1974 report titled Science and the Challenges Ahead, and it was accurate at the time. The report goes on to talk about potential human impacts on the global climate--both in adding dust to the atmosphere for a potential cooling effect, and by "activities of the expanding human population--especially those involved with the burning of fossil fuels--[that] raised the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, which acts as a 'greenhouse' for retaining the heat radiated from the Earth's surface." The report notes that "the state of knowledge regarding climate and its changes is too limited to predict reliably whether the present, unanticipated cooling trend will continue."

The second half of the quote comes from another report, from 1972, called Patterns and Perspectives in Environmental Science. Reader David McManus pointed out the games Forbes played with this quote; here's the sentence in full, with emphasis added:

Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end, to be followed by a long period of considerably colder temperatures leading into the next glacial age some 20,000 years from now.

The report immediately adds: "However, it is possible, or even likely that human interference has already altered the climate so much that the climatic pattern of the near future will follow a different path." It goes on to discuss "increased atmospheric opacity" as a possible cooling factor, counterbalanced by the fact that "increasing concentration of industrial carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should lead to a temperature increase by absorption of infrared radiation from the Earth's surface."

Needless to say, someone who is unable to correctly report what a book says is unlikely to be able to perform the much more complicated task of independently analyzing climate data and pointing out where all those scientists went wrong.

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 Obama’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 conservative colleagues failed to actually read the brief story before commenting on it? It's possible, because any minimally careful reading would reveal that Dr. David Scheiner was criticizing "ObamaCare" from the left:

What should the president be focused on? Scheiner thinks that a good health reform would be "Medicare for all," a single-payer system where the government would cover everyone and pay for it by cutting out waste in the system. "A neurosurgeon gets paid $20,000 for cutting into the neck of my patient. Have him get paid $1 million a year instead of $2 million or $3 million. He won't starve," Scheiner says.

It's not at all clear that NRO's Hemingway realized this at first, because after publishing the item omitting mention that Dr. Scheiner supported "Medicare for all," he revisited the story, writing:

Update: I didn't intend to present this as one-sided, I quickly cut and pasted the first three grafs. Suffice to say, you should keep in mind the Hyde Park doc is criticizing ObamaCare from the left. Either way, that people close to the president feel free to express these kinds of opinions doesn't seem to bode well for healthcare reform politically.

Beyond Hemingway's odd suggestion that it's a bad thing for a president to know people who openly disagree with him, it seems somewhat unlikely that he, as an NRO blogger, would have approvingly quoted a single-payer advocate's criticism of the president--that is, if he knew the critic was a single-payer supporter.

We've all heard of stories that were too good to check out--for some on the right, this one may have been too good to even read.

Dirk Smillie's Forbes interview (6/18/09) with veteran news analyst Andrew Tyndall includes the observation that "mainstream press--network newscasts in particular--have been criticized for overly favorable coverage of the Obama administration." Tyndall takes the opportunity to make some important distinctions about this common allegation:

There may be a personality bias, not a liberal bias. Since the inauguration, Obama has completely dominated the news agenda. He's a ratings getter. Compare that with George W. Bush's early days in the White House. There was very little news until September 11. It's certainly true that there has been favoritism toward Obama, but only in the sense that the networks want to cover him.

The crucial point usually missed in this conversation: "That's not the same thing as reporting with a bias toward his policies." See FAIR's take on this trend from even before Obama won the presidency--Media Advisory: "Pro-Obama Media?: What Talk About Media Favoritism Really Means" (11/4/08).

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 entirely resume-based: Kurt Andersen founded Spy and does a culture show on NPR! David Shipley wrote speeches for Bill Clinton and works at the New York Times! Gerald Seib works at the Wall Street Journal but doesn't write for the editorial page! Andersen is the kind of "liberal" who writes about "the Democrats' 'mommy party' M.O. of naivete, mollycoddling, and profligacy," Seib does pieces like "Bipartisanship Could Help Victorious Democrats," while Shipley's Times op-ed page has been the object of repeated complaints from FAIR for its right-slanted choices.

There's a couple of people on the list--Jon Stewart and Oprah Winfrey--who are indeed influential liberals who are "in U.S. media"...but if by "media" they don't mean journalism, why not include Steven Spielberg or Bruce Springsteen?  They're "in U.S. media" too.

Then there's the bloggers, who largely define themselves as not being part of the "MSM": Arianna Huffington, Kevin Drum, Glenn Greenwald, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Joshua Micah Marshall.

That leaves six people on the list of 25 who actually are liberal journalists with a regular platform in traditional U.S. media: the New Yorker's Hendrick Hertzberg; the Atlantic's James Fallows; Michael Pollan, a freelance writer for the New York Times; Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman; MSNBC's Rachel Maddow; and PBS's Bill Moyers. What does this say about the myth of the liberal media? Maybe the Hoover Institution can study that.

What would a real list of the most important progressive media figures look like? Feel free to leave suggestions in comments.