"I don't like the word 'Balance'"- Says ABC News Global Warming Reporter

U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works ^ | October 30, 2006 | Marc Morano and Matthew Dempsey

[tang-soo]

Majority Fact of the Day

"I don't like the word 'Balance'"- Says ABC News Global Warming Reporter

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MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2006

Contact: (Marc_Morano@epw.senate.gov ), (Matthew_Dempsey@epw.senate.gov )

ABC News Reporter Bill Blakemore declared "I don't like the word 'balance' much at all" in global warming coverage at a journalism conference in Vermont over the weekend.

Blakemore, who reported on August 30, 2006, "After extensive searches, ABC News has found no such [scientific] debate" on global warming, (http://abcnews.go.com/US/print?id=2374968) said he rejects 'balance' in order to justify excluding any skeptics of manmade catastrophic global warming from his reporting. He made his remarks at Friday's panel discussion at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference in Burlington.

Blakemore lamented "the deep professional shame that I discovered two years ago," regarding how he believes the media had been manipulated by skeptics of manmade catastrophic global warming.

"Of course [skeptics] play on the idea that we have to be 'balanced,'" he noted.

"It was very lazy of us for 10 years when we were asked for balance from the [climate skeptic] spinners. We just gave up and said 'Okay, okay - I will put the other side on, okay are you happy now?'" he said. "And it saves us from the trouble of having to check out the fact that these other sides were the proverbial flat earth society."

Blakemore also took on the role of psychologist in explaining that global warming presents an "existential" dilemma and people face what he termed "psychological obstacles" about whether to believe the dire predictions that the planet is facing a climate crisis.

"We are looking at serious mainstream scientists now tell us that maybe - it's over. It's hard. It's the kind of news you have to take in small doses," Blakemore explained. [EPW note: Many scientists dispute the notion that mankind has created a climate doomsday. See: (http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=264777 )]

"Denial is initially natural and healthy; the psychologists tell us it is what we do to hold our meaning system together, so that we can at least function at first when trauma happens and we are all being delivered a major trauma here," he explained. He added that greenhouse gas theory is akin to "3rd grade science."

"Does [extreme weather patterns] fit exactly within the predicted pattern that we projected almost 30 or 40 years ago? This is the little logical problem that we journalists can still work on and solve," Blakemore said. (EPW Note: 30 and 40 years ago, scientists were erroneously predicting a coming ice age. See last week's Newsweek's retraction of global cooling reporting 31 years after its initial report: (http://epw.senate.gov/fact.cfm?party=rep&id=265087 ))

"The problem is we journalists have not stood up on our own feet and said 'Excuse me, this is going to be my assessment of where the scientific assessment is.' Because those spinners would say you got to listen to who -- for the scientific assessment and they will point to their favorable [skeptical] organizations." He also said, "I am a professional journalist; don't tell me how to do my job."

Blakemore said skeptics of global warming should be ignored because some of them are being funded by industry. But he has failed to note that scientists he promotes such as James Hansen, Michael Oppenheimer, are both recipients of huge sums of money from environmental special interest groups.

When Blakemore reported on January 29, 2006, that NASA scientist James Hansen was alleging that the Bush Administration was censoring his scientific work, he failed to inform viewers that Hansen had received a quarter of a million dollars from Teresa Heinz Kerry's foundation, the Heinz Foundation, and subsequently endorsed her husband Democrat John Kerry for President in 2004 http://www.abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1555183 In addition, Michael Oppenheimer is a paid partisan of the group Environmental Defense.

Blakemore also told the journalism conference that global warming was an ever present entity that "affects everything in the weather, everywhere all the time and in every instance."

Blakemore has also lavished praised on Vice President Al Gore and his movie "An Inconvenient Truth", comparing Gore to Shakespeare and Robert Frost. http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2006/05/al_gore_and_an_.html

Related Links:



Renowned Scientist Defects From Belief in Global Warming - Caps Year of Vindication for Skeptics - (>)

[Paladin2]

This MSM shill needs to go through the documented 1970's MSM/LSM/DBM hysterical BS about Global Cooling where we were doomed in about 20 years if we didn't do something immediately.

Apparently we were doomed to repeat the climate hysteria all over again.

[LiteKeeper]

where is the BARF ALERT?

[cripplecreek]

What a piece of crap.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

The Carbon grab. Its what the elitists have in mind...

[dogbyte12]

I agree with him. No not on global warming being "proven", but on the balance issue. It's ridiculous. The President states a fact, and Teddy Kennedy gets to "balance" it.

The media's job isn't balance, it is reporting facts wherever the chips may fall. The problem is the media is filled with maroons who wouldn't know a fact if it hit them on the ass.

But on the issue of balance, absolutely. I don't need a member of the flat earth society on any time we have a shuttle launch disputing that they are circling the planet.

[stboz]

I wish somebody would beat these morons about the head and shoulders with facts....beat them.....again....and again.

[Sisku Hanne]

Still waiting on that ice age they promised. Weren't we all supposed to be trudging across the frozen tundra by now?

[kcar]

Anymore I don't like the word "journalist". And the juxtaposition of that term with the word "balance" is just way too much man-made hot air.

[NapkinUser]

I can't remember who said it, but the global warming scare crap is tantamount to the killer bee scare of the 1970's and the Y2K nutjob fear in 1999.

[ClaireSolt]

Instead of hogging the cameras themselves on their way to fame and fortune, I woud like to hear from actual scientists.

[DeweyCA]

An article in the last 2 days said that a manager at two media outlets in Maine told his people to ignore global warming, using the quote that you provided.

[Paladin2]

The reports and websites are out there. Many have been linked on previous FR threads. I'd suggest a search using Gore as a keyword. ;-)

[maine-iac7]

The media's job isn't balance

ahh, but CNN thinks it is.

They send an email to the enemy and say - hey, if you send us film from your side - we'll show it in the interest of balance...

Hitler would have loved CNN. Can't you see it - the war from Hitler's perspective?

However - CNN and the rest twist the coverage on our side to favor the barbarians too - so that's not really "balance"

[Englishman]

ABC say they can't find any scientific evidence to balance human caused global warming????? How hard were they looking? Global warming is cyclical as is cooling. 1500 years ago one could grow grapes in northern England! Since then the earth cooled and is now back in a warming cycle. How utterly dishonest the MSM has become.

[Unam Sanctam]

I don't think it beyond the realm of possibility that a lot of scientists are agenda driven and have political motives. Facts and studies can be spun, and I don't think it is unreasonable to think that this might be happening here, if indeed it is true that there are no good scientists who question global warming, which I doubt. All the best scientists of Galileo's day dismissed his conclusions out of hand as against the best science of the day.

[Binghamton_native]

Perhaps our friend Blakemore would like to stack-up his science credentials against those of Danish scientist, Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. The libs absolutely go berserk with this book.

[crazyhorse691]

Blakemore also told the journalism conference that global warming was an ever present entity that "affects everything in the weather, everywhere all the time and in every instance."

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A born again warmingian. Can't argue science with a secularist theologian.

[Emmett McCarthy]

Ah, good ol' Y2K! Somebody sold a lot of generators and bottled water.

[kcar]

Journalists compete to lower the price of their integrity to well below the once-standard 40 rubles. But they do control the microphones. So to hear actual scientists you have to somehow pass through them. And science, being now thoroughly politicized, revolves around money. Research money. Government funding is the goal here. Politicians respond to scary scenarios, and that also sells papers, so global cooling today, global warming tomorrow, whatever sells.