“Global Warming.” “Climate change.” “Global weirding.” “Climate disruption.”
The terms are unavoidable as news stories that deploy them. The American media love nothing more than claiming weather events are part of some greater pattern – whether they are or not.
With President Barack Obama’s latest climate push, journalists are once more linking every random weather happening they can find and saying, “See!” with a giant I-told-you-so look on their faces.
They aren’t covering the story, they are acting like the bearded lunatic on the street corner holding a sign saying, “The End Is Near!” Instead, they parrot the White House saying: “It is already happening.” It sounds almost like a bad movie trailer.
In this Jan. 28, 2009, file photo, a spectator applies sun cream while others eat ice cream as they try to keep cool in the scorching heat on Rod Laver Arena at the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne, Australia. (AP/Rick Stevens, File)
The broadcast networks helped the White House climate push leading up to the release of the report, as the report was released and after it. No analysis. No journalist sat there and tried to poke holes in the assessments. No one was pointing out that the previous predictions have been wrong. And the only criticism came from liberal journalists wondering what took Obama so long.
They aren’t news people, they are propagandists.
Leading up to the event, CBS “This Morning” co-host Norah O'Donnell dwelled on “the potential risk to Americans.” Co-host Gayle King warned: “The Obama administration says climate change is hurting Americans and the pain will get worse.”
As the saying goes, “no pain, no gain.” The gain for the White House is obvious. It gets a crisis – one of those you can’t let go to waste. It gets tons of totally supportive media attention on something that doesn’t involve dead ambassadors or the IRS treating the Constitution like it, too, is dead and gone. The Obama administration gets an issue it can run on, complete with a pre-gift from Democrat funder Tom Steyer of $100 million or more.
What it doesn’t get are pesky questions. It gets days of press releases.
People scream outside the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to demand immediate political action on Climate debate on September 27, 2013 in Stockholm. AFP PHOTO/JONATHAN NACKSTRAND
The night of May 6, when the report was released, ABC, CBS and NBC treated the story like it was the greatest story ever told. CBS included three separate segments on the tragedy of climate change from droughts to flooding.
“No region of the country will be spared,” said Major Garrett. Sadly, that’s true about the media coverage, as well.
ABC correspondent Ginger Zee bragged that Obama had asked her a question. Like Ohmagawd! He spoke to her!
“The President actually asked me a question. He wanted to know which storm was the worst that I had ever covered.”
That would have to be the current snow job she and others are giving the American public on climate.
NBC was the worst. Correspondent Peter Alexander did a region-by-region breakdown for the whole country. Only NBC, which loves manipulating important video, spun what it reported. The network interviewed Vermont maple producer Burr Morse and quoted him complaining about how warm it had been at night and how that made it tough to get the syrup.
US President Barack Obama speaks on climate change on June 25, 2013 at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Obama said Tuesday that Americans were already paying the price for global warming, and that despite opposition from climate change deniers, "we need to act." "Americans across the country are already paying the price of inaction," Obama said, unveiling a a national strategy to fight greenhouse gas emissions, and adding: "as a president, as a father, and as an American, I am here to say, we need to act." AFP PHOTO/Mandel NGAN
Only that wasn’t what he said. Morse actually complained it had been so cold (remember the polar vortex?) that he couldn’t tap the trees until April. By then, it was too warm. Morse was livid, saying NBC had selected a short sample of his full remarks to “support their point which was global warming.”
Morse’s anecdote was telling because it showed how far journalists will go to twist an event into an agenda. We’ve been told for years that no single weather event can be linked to climate. Now that’s out the window as networks grab news clips from random events to create an entirely bogus trend.
Remember this? The World Meteorological Organisation was quoted by Greenpeace’s Energydesk: “No single weather episode can prove or disprove global climate change.”
OK, if that wasn’t good enough, there’s this, from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. It’s run by the liberal Pew Center’s founder and former president Eileen Claussen. They say the same thing, “no single weather event can be linked directly to a long-term driver, such as global warming.”
Now none of that matters. Journalists are on the climate beat, so named because it’s the issue they and the liberals intend to beat the American public with till we scream, “Uncle Al.”
Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture. He writes frequently about media for TheBlaze. He can also be contacted on Facebook and Twitter as @dangainor.
–
TheBlaze contributor channel supports an open discourse on a range of views. The opinions expressed in this channel are solely those of each individual author.
