PBS's Nova is taking money from one of the biggest bankrollers of climate change denial--and,  surprise surprise, the resulting programming tells viewers not to worry about climate change.  But PBS's ombud doesn't see this as a conflict of interest--because Nova is a "consistently first-rate program," and he trusts it.

Nova's conflict of interest was highlighted out by Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm (9/7/10), who had previously caught the Smithsonian promoting strange climate science after getting a grant from oil billionaire David Koch (Climate Progress, 4/1/10). Koch, who's a major funder of propaganda rejecting the science of climate change, is also one of the main underwriters of the popular PBS science program Nova--which is in itself a case of strange bedfellows.  (Another major sponsor of Nova is ExxonMobil, the other top funder of science-denial in support of  oil industry profits.)

With the New Yorker's Jane Mayer (8/30/10) calling attention to the Koch family's political donations--and mentioning the fear that David Koch's contributions are affecting the Smithsonian's exhibits--people naturally paid more attention to the donor credit for David Koch on a recent Nova rerun (8/31/10) called "Becoming Human." What raised more than a few eyebrows was the program's enthusiasm for climate change as a  driver of human evolution--with a not-so-subtle suggestion that we should bear this in mind in our current era of rapidly shifting weather:

Narrator: It is a simple but revolutionary idea: Human evolution is nature's experiment with versatility. We're not adapted to any one environment or climate, but to many; we are creatures of climate change.

Geographer Mark Maslin: I think we should actually look to our proud ancestry and how we evolved in East Africa and say: "That's how we survived that. We can survive the future, because we are that creature, because we are that smart."

Note that Maslin is not actually a climate-change denier--he's really a strong advocate for immediate action to restrict carbon emissions--but Nova quotes him as though he takes the don't-worry-be-happy stance adopted by...well, people like David Koch. Why is that?

As usual, PBS insiders take the position that where you get your money from is absolutely irrelevant, once again rejecting the entire rationale for public broadcasting: "Nova, like all WGBH programs, maintains complete, independent editorial control of its content," Nova executive producer Paula Apsell told PBS ombud Michael Getler. Getler, for his part, declares that "one rarely knows when or how, if at all, influence works its way," and that "as a viewer of what strikes me and a lot of others as a consistently first-rate program, I trust Nova"--a hands-off stance that would seem to reject the entire rationale for having an ombud.

PBS's position echoes the Smithsonian's--David Koch is "very interested in the content, but completely hands off," museum director Cristián Samper told the New Yorker. And that's Koch's position as well; asked by Archeology magazine (2/17/09) if he was involved in the editorial content of Nova's evolutionary programming, he replied:  "No, I am not. I've been following the Nova series ever since it first came on the air. I'm a great admirer."

In that same interview, though, Koch describes a visit to Olduvai Gorge to inspect the Leakey digs, which he also bankrolls: "When I got there they had discovered a Hominin's bones. They left them in the earth, waiting for me to arrive. And then when I arrived, they let me pull them out of the ground, which was kind of fun."

Presumably the Leakeys let him extract those bones not because of his paleontological expertise, but because they knew it would make a major donor happy. Nova also knows that downplaying the dangers of climate change would make its major donors happy--and it aired a program that presented climate change as a positive force for good. If you want to believe that that's a coincidence--well, all you have to do is trust Nova.

Deeming "the battle against baseless, worthless grants of anonymity by journalists" to be "at this point, probably futile," Salon's Glenn Greenwald (6/15/09, ad-viewing required) is exasperated to see how "even many of the nation's best and most valuable reporters--such as the New Yorker's Jane Mayer--seem helplessly addicted to it." Greenwald points to "an otherwise solid and at times enlightening article on CIA Director Leon Panetta and his resistance to investigating past CIA abuses" in which Mayer

includes this passage at the beginning of her article to explain how Panetta was chosen only after Obama's first choice, John Brennan, was rejected:

A friend of Brennan's from his C.I.A. days complained to me, "After a few Cheeto-eating people in the basement working in their underwear who write blogs voiced objections to Brennan, the Obama Administration pulled his name at the first sign of smoke, and then ruled out a whole class of people: Anyone who had been at the agency during the past 10 years couldn't pass the blogger test."

What possible justification is there to grant anonymity to someone to spout these clichéd and factually false insults? First, as I've documented numerous times and as Mayer herself well knows, the case against Brennan was not that he was "at the agency for the past 10 years" or even that he had anything to do with the torture program, but rather that (as she herself documents later in the piece) he explicitly advocated and defended many of the worst torture techniques and other Bush abuses. Second, unlike the individual who is willing to spout these insults only while cowardly hiding behind Mayer's shield of anonymity, the bloggers who led the opposition to Brennan (including myself and the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan) all attached their names to their views and--as Spencer Ackerman notes--are about as far away as one can be from the trite, adolescent cartoons spewed by Mayer's anonymous insulter. Third, one of the principal points of Mayer's long article is that the objections to Brennan have been vindicated, because--as Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser--he has led the way in urging Obama to keep past CIA abuses suppressed and Bush crimes protected from accountability.

While "the anonymous name-calling Mayer passes on appears on the first page of her piece," Greenwald discovers that way down "on page 5, she includes the facts that show how factually false is the characterization of the objections to Brennan"--there Mayer personally admits that "in an interview with me two years ago, Brennan defended the use of 'enhanced' interrogation techniques and extraordinary renditions." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Glenn Greenwald on Torture" (4/24/09).