On their blog The World Newser, ABC reporter Bill Blakemore writes about the loneliness of the global-warming (panic) beat, where resistance is futile to the certitude of man's fossil-fuel addiction frying the planet like a fish stick. He looks forward to the day when we're all running around in the circles panicking in the street about the scorched Earth to come:

It will be a relief - albeit a sad one - as more and more of the public begins to acknowledge and deal with the true scale and impact of this story, as seems to be happening now, so that we who cover it may come to feel less isolated.

It can be great to be alone on a story - the admittedly vain thrill of being first to discover important facts that people are clearly going to agree they needed to learn, of mining exotic and unexplored mother lodes of startling information with a few respected colleagues - but only for so long.

Blakemore insists the problem is that media bosses and the public are just too apathetic to grasp the "realities" of the situation:

We few who have been covering this story have come to understand the natural denial that editors and public have had about the realities of global warming. The other frustrations of covering this story are more familiar to journalism - how to explain the unfamiliar science, how to get our arms around the many parts of this story with its financial, political, biological and epidemiological impacts.

These frustrations are of the sort we professional journalists enjoy overcoming - it’s our craft and solving such difficulties of communication is what we enjoy doing.

Yes, it's a lonely beat for "mainstream" media, when objectivity gets thrown into the dumpster, and "most credible scientists" are the only people worth consulting and quoting. Skeptics, after all, are merely tools of the oil industry, right?

This is, after all, a story in which the most credible scientists now say life on earth could become unbearable for most humans - widepspread famine and political chaos -- even within within the lifetime of today's toddlers if we don't soon curb greenhouse gas emissions.

—Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center