Newsweek Admits 74 Percent of Gore Letters Are Critical, But Fails to Publish Any

November 15th, 2009 10:19 PM

Newsweek has done it again: a few weeks after acknowledging half its letters were critical of Joe Biden (but publishing none of them), they proclaimed their Al Gore cover was unpopular. Forty-six percent of their letter writers wrote on the subject of Gore, and 74 percent of them were critical. Still, Newsweek ran only positive letters. The first, most prominent one (in larger red type) read: "Until each nation makes responsibility for this earth a priority, we will continue to devastate it – and ourselves."

The next letter praises Gore's courage and conscience, but still presses him from the left to crush the problem of human overpopulation:

As a six-continent bicycle traveler for the past 35 years, I admire Al Gore addressing climate change. However, he fails to highlight the basic factor accelerating it: human overpopulation. Either we address it, or Mother Nature will do it for us. – Frosty Wooldridge, Golden, Colo.

Then the reading gets really hair-curling. Lee Bidgood Jr of Gainesville, Florida compared global-warming deniers to people who denied the Holocaust:

Propaganda by global-warming skeptics and deniers reminds me of 1944, when as an Army officer I saw living skeletons in striped pajamas. Horror stories about Nazi concentration camps suddenly rang true. I wondered how intelligent people could commit such atrocities. History records the effectiveness of Joseph Goebbels's propaganda. I hope Al Gore and others can prevail over today's anti--science propaganda.

Newsweek even included a letter from a professional liberal complaining that all the goo for Gore was ruined by including an essay by Karl Rove. It was (as usual) an "unworthy" counterpoint: "Rove's essay repeats debunked claims about cap-and-trade systems and fails to offer an alternative method for significantly reducing carbon emissions to the levels scientists say are necessary. Rove's opinion piece was an unworthy counterpoint to Gore's serious call to action."

It was signed Aaron Huertas, Press Secretary, Union of Concerned Scientists, Washington, D.C.