Senator’s Office Objects To Disgraceful Newsweek Global Warming Article

As NewsBusters reported, Newsweek published an absolutely disgraceful cover-story Saturday calling manmade global warming skeptics "deniers" funded by oil companies and other special interests making them as bad as folks who misled people about the dangers of cigarette smoking.

In fact, the article was so thoroughly offensive that it has received an angry response from Sen. James Inhofe's (R-Okla.) communications director.

Writing at the Senate Environment & Public Works minority blog, Marc Morano made his objections to this article early and often (emphasis added throughout):

Newsweek Magazine's cover story of August 13, 2007 entitled, "The Truth About Denial" contains very little that could actually be considered balanced, objective or fair by journalistic standards.

After an introduction, Morano first went after the authors' continued reference to global warming skeptics as "deniers":

The use of this terminology has drawn the ire of Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. "The phrase ‘climate change denier' is meant to be evocative of the phrase ‘holocaust denier,'" Pielke, Jr. wrote on October 9, 2006 (LINK)

"Let's be blunt. This allusion is an affront to those who suffered and died in the Holocaust. This allusion has no place in the discourse on climate change. I say this as someone fully convinced of a significant human role in the behavior of the climate system," Pielke, Jr. explained.

As someone with family members who died and were imprisoned during the Holocaust, I fully agree. And, as I mentioned in my Sunday article on this subject, Newsweek owes every global warming skeptic an apology for their use of this epithet.

Morano next set his sights on the fact that Newsweek only wrote about moneys going to skeptics, and completely ignored the scope of funds financing global warming alarmism:

Newsweek reporter Eve Conant was given the documentation showing that proponents of man-made global warming have been funded to the tune of $50 BILLION in the last decade or so, while skeptics have received a paltry $19 MILLION by comparison.

Unlike Newsweek, Morano presented actual hard dollar numbers contributed by various groups to fund global warming research and the advancement of climate change hysteria.

How was this information ignored by Newsweek which presents itself as a member of the media, and not a political action group?

This question is especially relevant given the article's contention that global warming skeptics are being used by industry to obfuscate the truth.

Isn't this position completely made moot when it is obvious that Newsweek was omitting pertinent facts on this issue in order to prove its point?

Of course, this appeared unimportant to Newsweek as Morano noted:

Journalism students across the world can read this week's cover story to learn how reporting should not be done. Hopefully, that will be Newsweek's legacy -- serving as a shining example of the failure of modern journalism to adhere to balance, objectivity and fairness. Anyone who fails to see this inconvenient truth is truly (to borrow Newsweek's vernacular) a "denier."

I quite agree, and highly recommend the reading of his entire analysis.

In the end, this piece of detritus belonged in the op-ed section of Newsweek, and had absolutely no business being presented to the public as a comprehensive article on this controversial subject.