Does Avoidance of ClimateGate Reporting Represent MSM Suicide?

Notice how the mainstream media pretty much avoids the inconvenient scandal of ClimateGate? Although this scandal seems to mark the end of blind faith in the global warming dogma, it could also represent the final act of the long MSM suicide that has been going on for the past few years. That is the assertion made by author, broadcaster, and columnist Gerald Warner in a fascinating UK Telegraph article:

Climategate is a global household name. No cat has ever emancipated itself more completely from the bag. It is a world-wide scandal – thanks to the internet. Yet, as its ramifications proliferate and dominoes continue to fall, the most repeatedly asked question online is: how can the mainstream media ignore this? Well, we know the answer to that: the MSM are in thrall to the leftist consensus. End of story.

Accordng to Warner, ClimateGate is not just another scandal. It could be the terminal event of the media in their slow suicide whose pace has been quickening over the past few years:

Are the mainstream media capable of surviving their sidelining of the number one global scoop? Are they finally committing suicide? Are they, in fact, any longer mainstream? Every historian knows that any significant trend in society will show warning symptoms over a long period; but the final catastrophe will usually be triggered by a single event. For the moribund MSM that decisive blunder may well be Climategate.

Another feature of any doomed institution is that it signals its imminent demise by behaving in a manner that is contrary to its nature and purpose. Every city in the developed world contains news rooms in which cringing journalists struggle to satisfy the imperative demands of editors for a scoop. Yet the obvious scoop – the BIG ONE of journalistic mythology – is consigned to the waste basket. This is the journalism of Isvestia and Pravda, with all the commercial viability that attached to that school of news reporting.

"Move along. Nothing to see here." That was the attitude of most of the MSM after their quick initial reporting (if any) of ClimateGate. 

Here is the Warner prognosis of the ailing MSM:

The dead-tree press is already on the critical list. In the United States, in the six months to 31 March this year, newspaper circulation slumped by 7 per cent, according to the US Audit Bureau of Circulations. This was a steeper decline than in the two previous recorded periods (you can reasonably attribute that to the vomit-inducing idolatry of Barack Obama that permeated the American press at that time). In the UK the comparable figure was 5 per cent. How many businesses do you know that record such declines, in an unreversed trend, and survive?

And Warner is equally as critical of the BBC which does it best to promote the global warming ideology:

That is the despised organisation that relentlessly inflicts climate alarmist propaganda, fairy tales, “bedtime stories” on the British public, in the style of Radio Moscow, circa 1954 (“Implement the resolutions of the 23rd Congress…” “We have 27 minutes to save the polar bears from melting…”). No intelligent or inquiring individual believes, respects or trusts the BBC. Ditto the print media that is similarly spewing out Al Gore’s trashy superstition.

And since the MSM is failing in its task to provide information, people are increasingly turning to the internet as their news source:

So, instead of proving its worth, serving truth and debate, arresting the attention of the public by exposing our rulers’ lies, the MSM are rolling over to become a mouthpiece of the consensus, repelling readers and viewers as they go online, just as citizens in Iron Curtain countries once tuned in covertly to Western media. The internet is the new samizdat. All of this may still be a relatively gradual process while all citizens are being deprived of is information and debate. But when the bill is presented to sustain the phoney religion consecrated at Copenhagen, when taxes rocket, when we can barely see by the light of mercury bulbs, when every amenity of life is threatened – will people still be willing to pay money for newspapers and television channels that tell them to submit to this tyranny, when they could be exploding the myth and freeing society?

And now for the Gerald Warner money quote on the MSM suicide:

...The Mainstream Media are hanging themselves – it is doubtful that they can any longer be described as mainstream. These are turkeys voting for Christmas.

LOL! Although here in America, it would be more apt to say: "These are turkeys voting for Thanksgiving."