More than 24 hours after NBC's Matt Lauer prompted him to say it in an interview, the morning programs all showcased it – and even after day-long playback on the cable channels – CBS and NBC on Tuesday night delighted in again highlighting President Barack Obama's boast that he's gathering information on the oil leak “so I know whose ass to kick.”
Katie Couric put the soundbite, from a competitor, at the top of the CBS Evening News: “In a TV interview aired today, the President said if BP's CEO worked for him, he'd be fired. And Mr. Obama defended his handling of the disaster.”
NBC Nightly News provided a re-run. A day after anchor Brian Williams trumpeted as “just into us” the bite illustrating how Obama “showed some anger on the topic of his handling of this spill so far,” reporter Anne Thompson touted: “Criticized for not conveying his anger over the nation's greatest environmental disaster, President Obama fired back during an exclusive interview with NBC's Matt Lauer.”
Anne Thompson
The American lawyers who flock to Guantanamo Bay to represent captured terrorists are simply fulfilling their duty to provide representation, it is often argued by those who seem to enjoy mucking up efforts to curtail future terrorism. But once representing the American beverage giant Coca Cola makes Attorney General Eric Holder a “corporatist” who’s going to “do the Devil’s work” and only “pretend” to go tough on BP after the oil spill, lefty talk radio host Mike Malloy (a onetime CNN news writer) argued Wednesday night. (Audio here.)I guess you know this by now, the, uh, Justice Department under Eric Holder who defended, uh, was it Coca-Cola, against murder charges in, uh, South America? Good old Eric Holder, another corporatist, who, uh, is going to do the Devil’s work now and pretend that he is conducting a criminal investigation into the events that led to the oil gush?For their part, the big three network evening newscasts reported Holder’s announcement of a “criminal investigation” against BP during their Tuesday night broadcasts, but only CBS’s Chip Reid struck what could be called a skeptical note about the Obama administration’s motives in publicly touting the investigation after a week of criticism about the federal government’s less-than-effective handling of the matter.
For years the global warming alarmists' mantra has been "the science is settled." But a recent series of shocking disclosures about climate science has shaken the credibility of that claim.
The first scandal - ClimateGate - came Nov. 20, 2009, after someone leaked thousands of e-mails from a major climate science group: University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The e-mails were full of startling admissions like this one: "We can't account for the lack of warming at the moment."
Since then there has been an avalanche of admissions and disclosures spreading online through Web sites and foreign newspapers. The cumulative effect has impacted the truthworthiness of the climate science movement. Yet the networks haven't even adjusted their news coverage of the global warming issue to reflect the discoveries.
ABC, CBS and NBC featured 26 stories during Holy Week about Pope Benedict's perceived role in the sex abuse scandal the Catholic Church is now facing. Only one story focused on the measures the church has adopted in recent years to prevent abuse. In 69 percent of the stories (18 out of 26) reporters used language that presumed the pope's guilt. Only one made specific mention of the recent drop in the incidence of abuse allegations against the Catholic Church.
NBC's Nightly News and ABC's World News on Tuesday provided drastically different reports on the Obama administration's announced plans to build the country's first new nuclear power plant in 30 years. Nightly News host Brian Williams showcased liberal concern and fretted, "...[Obama's] critics are openly wondering what it is he's up to."
The segment by correspondent Anne Thompson attacked Obama from the left on the plans for the "controversial" new plant. She highlighted Friend of the Earth CEO Erich Pica complaining, "There are reactors across this country that have tons of waste just sitting there, waiting for something to happen."
Over on World News, however, reporter Jake Tapper actually included a former anti-nuclear activist, Dr. Patrick Moore, to argue for the power plants. Tapper first explained that "plant design and equipment requirements have been upgraded. Plants are now required to be able to shut down automatically."
Network journalists who were quick to see racists, haters and extremists amongst the “tea party” protesters were oblivious on Saturday to communists in the “climate justice” march in Copenhagen whose cause they trumpeted -- even as the video they showed included brief shots of marchers waving red flags displaying the Soviet Union's hammer and sickle. “The streets were filled today with tens of thousands of protesters from around the world, demanding action to stop global warming,” NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt announced before Anne Thompson marveled: “An extraordinary sight in front of Denmark's parliament building: 35,000 protesters filling the square, stepping off on a slow march with an urgent plea: Save the planet.”
On the CBS Evening News, anchor Jeff Glor touted how “around the world tonight, protesters are creating heat over climate change. In Copenhagen, where UN talks on global warming are under way, police estimate 40,000 activists marched, mostly peacefully, to demand an agreement that produces real change.” Reporter Sheila MacVicar began: “From India to Australia, from China to Copenhagen, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets.”
ABC and CBS discounted the scientific relevance of the admissions and obfuscations displayed in the ClimateGate e-mails, but on Wednesday night they finally devoted full stories to the controversy and quoted the “most-damning” of the e-mails, the ones referring to a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a temperature measurement and in which a scientist fretted “we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't.”The two networks, however, painted the “stolen” e-mails not as laudatory whistle-blowing, but as an unwanted impediment to the left's global warming agenda. “Just as the world seems finally poised to do something about global warming, an inconvenient scandal,” ABC's David Wright began in playing off the title of Al Gore's movie. He despaired that “as the controversy heats up, the consensus about making the tough choices to curb carbon emissions threatens to crumble.”
On CBS, Wyatt Andrews relayed how “to many Republicans, ClimateGate proves that global warming is a deception,” before he countered: “But if that's true, it's a fraud adopted by most of the world's leading scientists, along with NASA, the U.N., the American Medical Association, and the National Academies of Science of 32 countries, including the United States. To most of them, ClimateGate is a sideshow compared to one overwhelming fact:” Viewers then were treated to this declaration from the scientist with the “hide the decline” boast: “The last decade is the warmest decade on record.”
CBS and NBC on Tuesday nightly eagerly pounced on the latest UN pronouncement about a warming world, without any regard for ClimateGate disclosures about manipulation of past data and without mentioning, as the AP noted, “the United States and Canada experienced cooler conditions than average.” CBS anchor Katie Couric announced: “At the world climate conference in Copenhagen today, scientists said this decade is on track to become the warmest since records were first kept back in 1850.” NBC anchor Brian Williams touted “a big headline from that climate meeting going on in Copenhagen. The United Nations weather experts reported today this decade is on track to become the warmest since it started keeping records back in 1850. And 2009, they say, could rank among the top five warmest years ever.” He proceeded to set up a piece about Peru: “Anne Thompson shows us a place where they say the climate crisis is right there for all the world to see, in the form of glaciers melting and threatening the supply of fresh water.”
Those attending the conference on climate change “where an official said today the clock has ticked down to zero and it's time to act,” NBC anchor Brian Williams warned, “say it's so late in the game, so much damage has been done, they fear they can already see how this ends.” Anne Thompson then declared: “This is about life or death -- 192 countries are here in Copenhagen to cut the carbon emissions changing the climate and threatening the very existence of some nations and their people.”
Echoing that theme, CBS’s Mark Phillips stood in water up to his neck and then became completely submerged to illustrate the feared impact of rising sea levels: “The Maldives have become the canary in the global warming coal mine.”
NBC and ABC raised “ClimateGate” in passing – without actually using the term – only to dismiss the revelations. “The man who leads the U.N. panel that blames human activity for climate change said the science is broad and consistent,” Thompson reassured NBC viewers. Woodruff applied the “denier” pejorative as he asserted “climate change deniers say these e-mails are proof humans aren't causing global warming,” but “U.S. officials say the evidence proves otherwise.”
NBC's Anne Thompson, on Monday's Today, covered the Climategate story only to essentially dismiss it in a nothing-to-see here, move along fashion. CBS's The Early Show had a brief mention of it, and ABC's Good Morning America did nothing. Thompson, reporting live from Copenhagen, opened her piece declaring that delegates determined "this could be their last best chance to deal with the consequences of climate change," but then added "overshadowing all of this is a scandal involving some stolen e-mails that has skeptics, once again, questioning the whole idea of global warming."
Thompson went on to air criticism from Professor Ian Plimer, of the University of Adelaide who charged, "There's data being massaged," but then devoted the rest of her piece to confirming the existence of climate change, even allowing a Penn State scientist, who appeared in the e-mail exchange, to defend the use of the term "trick," by a colleague as he claimed: "What the person meant was it was a clever approach to the problem."
More than two weeks after ClimateGate broke, ABC's World News finally got around to mentioning it on Sunday evening, but not to explore how the e-mails discredited leading scientists who insist mankind is causing global warming as, instead, ABC declared “the science is solid” and NBC assured viewers “the evidence is overwhelming that man is behind climate change.”
ABC reporter Clayton Sandell merely included, in a larger story about the Copenhagen conference, how “global warming naysayers are claiming that e-mails stolen from” East Anglia University “show climate scientists discussing how to fudge results to promote the idea that humans are altering the planet.” After failing to inform viewers of any specifics the e-mails revealed, Sandell, who didn't utter a syllable about them on Sunday's Good Morning America, concluded his World News piece:
The science is solid, according to a vast majority of researchers, with hotter temperatures, melting glaciers, and rising sea level providing the proof.
Over on the NBC Nightly News, following a shoddy Friday night story, Anne Thompson checked in from Copenhagen with a story on “cautious optimism that a political agreement can be reached on reducing carbon dioxide emissions,” before she repeated the usual hysteria about how “the Greenland ice sheet...is melting at an ever faster pace.” Only at the very end did Thompson raise “this scandal called ClimateGate,” offering the most-benign explanation of how “essentially, in those e-mails, some climate scientists seem to be suggesting that perhaps they're massaging the data.” But, she countered in citing the UN's Yvo de Boer:
When you look at the overall science and the fact that science from around the world has been reviewed by scientists around the world -- 2,500 by the UN -- he says the evidence is overwhelming that man is behind climate change."
Two weeks after the scandal broke, NBC Nightly News on Friday night became the first broadcast network morning or evening news program to inform viewers about “ClimateGate,” but only in the most cursory manner as correspondent Anne Thompson, a long-time ally of the environmental left, despaired the e-mails may end up “giving politicians from coal and oil-producing states another reason to delay taking action to reduce emissions. The government's leading scientist told Congress there is no time to lose.”
Anchor Brian Williams had teased: “ClimateGate, they're calling it. A new scandal over global warming and it's burning up the Internet. Have the books been cooked on climate change?” But neither Williams nor Thompson ever again used the “ClimateGate” term as Thompson's story assured viewers the threat remains while she saw -- not a major scientific scandal -- but merely how “those who doubt that manmade greenhouse gases are changing the climate say” the e-mails “show climate scientists massaging data and suppressing studies by those who disagree.”
Thompson, who in 2007 declared “the scientific debate is no longer over society's role in global warming. It is now a matter of degrees,” allowed soundbites from a Republican Congressman and Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute, but countered with how “25 leading U.S. scientists accused climate change opponents of misrepresenting the e-mails' significance” and, after a clip of left-wing activist Michael Oppenheimer, she fretted over how, as quoted above, the e-mails will “delay” vital action. Thompson concluded with NOAA's administrator: “Climate change is not a theory. It is a documented set of observations about the world.”