You don’t need WikiLeaks to know how one-sided they are at CNN and The Washington Post. A new editorial by Post digitial opinions editor James Downie is headlined “How Campaign 2016 could shift the climate debate for the better.” This is a weird headline, since liberals don’t believe there is any debate about climate change.
Downie proclaimed “Only one of the two presidential candidates has a climate policy; luckily, it’s the one holding a commanding lead.” Hillary had a commanding lead in the last polls? That’s certainly debatable. Downie hoped the way that journalists threw out objectivity in bashing Trump can be a model for getting even more imbalanced in climate change coverage:
Shifting the discussion is one area where, surprisingly, the 2016 campaign could change the climate debate for the better, even though climate change has been absent from the discussion. The contest has altered political journalism in a important way: As CNN’s Dylan Byers writes, “The traditional model of ‘he said, she said’ journalism ... was thrown out the window in favor of a more aggressive journalism that sought to prioritize accuracy over balance.” More journalists have seen that the sky won’t fall if they treat falsehoods as falsehoods, and climate change is an obvious area to apply this new model. Senators should not be able to bring snowballs onto the Senate floor to “disprove” climate change without every headline fact-checking them. The realities of climate change are as much objective truth as the murder or unemployment rates. Regarding them as such will be an early test of whether political journalism has rededicated itself to the facts.
The debate over climate change is changing, but not as rapidly as it can or should. We have largely squandered decades that could have been spent heading off the danger, and now the consequences are no longer abstract. Climate change is a perilous threat to the country and the world; we must finally treat it that way.
Climate change, as real as "murder or unemployment rates"? Downie and Byers could go back to 1990, when PBS and their series Race to Save the Planet made the same claims. Have they held up as hard facts? Actress Meryl Streep announced the PBS take: "By the year 2000 -- that's less than 10 years away -- the earth's climate will be warmer than it's been in over 100,000 years. If we don't do something, there'll be enormous calamities in a very short time."
