NASA

The Big Three networks all recognized the 50th anniversary of John Glenn's historic orbital spaceflight on their evening newscasts on Monday. Both NBC and CBS highlighted how there's "no certainty when the U.S. will launch astronauts again, [and] Glenn worries America may be losing its edge." But the networks failed to mention that President Obama put the decades-old endeavor in limbo, which led to the unemployment of thousands of technicians.

Brian Williams concluded his report on NBC Nightly News by noting how "it irks Senator Glenn that the manned space program is now idle. The Shuttle program is over, and the only ride available into space for American astronauts is the Russians, the former enemy that [he] was chasing into space 50 years ago today."

NBC's Tom Costello made a gaffe of planetary proportions on Saturday's Nightly News as he reported on the launch of NASA's latest Martian rover. The correspondent identified the rocket, which blasted the unmanned Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) probe into space for its eight month-plus journey to the fourth planet, as a "Saturn V." This is actually the name of the rocket that took Apollo astronauts to the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The last Saturn V flew in 1973.

The expendable rocket that actually blasted off on Saturday morning, taking MSL and its Curiosity rover beyond the Earth's atmosphere, is the Atlas V. It is the newest member of a rocket family that has been in service since the 1950s. John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962 after a modified first-generation Atlas launched his Mercury capsule into space.

Michelle Malkin picked up on this vibe yesterday, and it has become more obvious in the intervening day: The establishment press, or at least parts of it, are downplaying the American exceptionalism -- and the exceptional Americans -- involved in the Chilean mine rescue.

Reports early this morning at the Associated Press and New York Times exemplify the point. Times reporters Alexei Barrionuevo and Simon Romero even chose to deliberately cast the rescue in brazenly cynical political terms.

 

In this morning's Denver Post, Mike Littwin manages to display simultaneously the insularity and smugness of the One Party media, as well as one of the last tools left in the left's rather empty playbook.

Apparently, during a Senate debate at Channel 12, Jane Norton said, "We need a NASA budget that doesn't cater to making Muslims feel good but that is strong on science ..." This scandalized Littwin, who assumed it was a cheap shot at Muslims. Evidently, he hadn't seen the video of NASA head Charles Bolden that's been making the rounds on the conservative and libertarian blogosphere:

Remarkably, instead of conceding that we're paying all those scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats to actually achieve, or at least facilitate achievement, in space, Littwin uses his and the rest of the MSM reporters' ignorance of the interview as evidence that the argument was out of place, and then goes straight for the race card:

In a June 30 interview with "Talk to Al Jazeera," NASA administrator Charles Bolden revealed that President Obama had tasked him with "find[ing] a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering."

The media largely ignored the story, with a few exceptions, such as Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer. 

Among the media outlets that blacked out the controversy was the Washington Post, which didn't cover the Bolden controversy until today. Even then, the paper printed on page A13 a brief 8-paragraph item by the Reuters news wire:

At the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog (HT Instapundit), Byron York documents the results of some Lexis Nexis searching:

• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program in the New York Times: 0.
• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program in the Washington Post: 0.
• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on NBC Nightly News: 0.
• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on ABC World News: 0.
• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on CBS Evening News: 0.

As a supplement, here are the results of a search on "Charles Bolden" (not entered in quotes), NASA's Director, done at 9:00 a.m. ET at the Associated Press's main site:

If you haven't heard the report of the remarks recently made by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden over what the role of his agency, it's a little troubling. And it hasn't gone unnoticed, at least not by syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer

Recently, Bolden, in an interview with Al Jazeera English, said that the "foremost" mission of NASA is to improve relations with the Muslim world. This drew the ire of Krauthammer on the July 5 broadcast of Fox News Channel's "Special Report with Bret Baier." (h/t Gateway Pundit)

"This is a new height in fatuousness," Krauthammer said. "NASA was established to get America into space and to keep is there. This idea to feel good about their past and to make achievements is the worst combination of group therapy, psychobabble, imperial condescension and adolescent diplomacy."

The Pentagon rescinded the invitation of evangelist Franklin Graham to speak at its May 6 National Day of Prayer event because of complaints about his previous comments about Islam.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation expressed its concern over Graham's involvement with the event in an April 19 letter sent to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. MRFF's complaint about Graham, the son of Rev. Billy Graham, focused on remarks he made after 9/11 in which he called Islam "wicked" and "evil" and his lack of apology for those words.

Col. Tom Collins, an Army spokesman, told ABC News on April 22, "This Army honors all faiths and tries to inculcate our soldiers and work force with an appreciation of all faiths and his past comments just were not appropriate for this venue."

On Wednesday's CBS Early Show, fill-in news reader Betty Nguyen reported on President Obama's new plan to cut back America's space program, but failed to mention sharp criticism by astronauts Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and Eugene Cernan in a signed letter sent to the White House.

Nguyen noted: "President Obama unveils a revamped plan for America's manned space program....reviving part of a plan he canceled earlier this year. NASA will begin development of a crew capsule called Orion....[it] won't go to the moon, but will be used as an emergency vehicle on the space station."

In contrast, on ABC's Good Morning America, anchor Juju Chang began a news brief on the same topic this way: "President Obama under fire, accused by the first man to set foot on the moon of leading the U.S. space program down a path of, quote, 'mediocrity.'" Correspondent Jake Tapper followed: "Armstrong and two other former astronauts wrote that it was a terrible decision. They called it 'a misguided proposal that forces NASA out of the human space operations for the foreseeable future.'"

NBC's Today also covered the criticism, as anchor Natalie Morales explained how: "three Apollo astronauts call the changes devastating. In a letter, Neil Armstrong, James Lovell and Eugene Cernan write, 'The President's plan destines our nation to become one of second, or even third-rate stature.'"

Has the emerging international ClimateGate scandal changed President Obama's global warming strategy?

After winning the Nobel Peace Prize last month, expectations were that Obama would not attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen due to it conflicting with the Nobel awards ceremony in Oslo.

This speculation was supported in the past couple of weeks when world leaders meeting in Singapore punted on reaching any firm agreements at the upcoming Copenhagen meeting, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R-Nev.) delayed action on cap-and-trade legislation until next spring.

Yet, within days of the ClimateGate scandal breaking, Obama surprisingly announced that he's going to Copenhagen with a pledge for serious carbon dioxide emissions cuts.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Chris Horner told FBN's Charles Payne Wednesday that this is by no means a coincidence (video embedded below the fold with transcript):

As NewsBusters has been reporting since the ClimateGate scandal first broke last Friday, America's media have either been shamefully ignoring the sensitive information hacked from a British university's computer system or dishonestly telling the public there's nothing to it.

If these revelations furthered the global warming myth by implicating skeptical scientists in a conspiracy to adjust temperature data while shutting out opinions contrary to their own, press outlets would likely have their science divisions poring over every e-mail and document available to find the proverbial smoking gun.

Because in this instance any such research could uncover information contrary to the agenda of most news outlets, scientific editors and reporters have abdicated their investigative responsibilities in an obvious attempt to protect policies they support and advocate.

With that in mind, the American Thinker's Marc Sheppard, clearly doing the media's job, examined the computer program source code available in what was hacked from this British Climate Research Unit (CRU), and discovered that this scandal is everything the global warming-obsessed media fear:

FNC host Glenn Beck on Tuesday cited a NewsBusters article in his attack on all the television news outlets that have boycotted the growing ClimateGate scandal.

As NewsBusters reported earlier in the day, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and NBC have completely ignored last week's bombshell story about controversial e-mail messages between some of the world's leading global warming alarmists.

By contrast, Fox has been all over this issue.

With this in mind, Beck used the NewsBusters piece to demonstrate that much as in their boycott of the ACORN scandal and green jobs czar Van Jones's peculiar associations, the television press are once again hiding important information from the public hoping it will all just go away (video embedded below the fold with transcript):

Our buddies at Minnesotans For Global Warming have done it again, this time addressing the growing scandal ClimateGate.

Using the old Tommy James and the Shondells classic "Draggin' the Line," our friend Elmer Beauregard has marvelously set this disgraceful episode to song.

Stow all fluids far from your computer, for the following is guaranteed to induce uncontrollable fits of laughter (video embedded below the fold with transcribed lyrics):

When a high-profile government employee goes overseas claiming "The democratic process doesn't quite seem to be working," should the American news media take notice.

After all, such was uttered Wednesday by NASA's James Hansen, one of the world's foremost climate alarmists who is disgusted by the fact that democratically elected governments aren't completely buying into his junk science concerning anthropogenic global warming.

As a result, he's not only advocating acts of civil disobedience here in America, but he is also in England to participate in a protest at the Coventry headquarters of power firm E.ON.

Makes one wonder if our tax dollars paid for his trip.

As the British Guardian reported Wednesday:

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) participated in a conference call with a number of bloggers on Wednesday.

On the agenda was the Fairness Doctrine, and what the Senator believes the Democrats have up their sleeves to attack conservative talk radio.

Also on the docket was an update on the potential for a carbon cap-and-trade scheme to be enacted by this Congress, and what Republicans are going to do to try to rein in spending (30-minute audio available here).

A Japanese energy commission released a report last month challenging the supposed international consensus that man is responsible for warming the planet while claiming that climate modeling -- the questionably accurate process of predicting the future so key to Nobel Laureate Al Gore's myth -- is immature and akin to ancient astrology.

The study also called the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's conclusion that global temperatures are likely to continue to rise "an unprovable hypothesis," while castigating "the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis." 

The Japan Society of Energy and Resources was founded in 1980 to "promote the science and technology concerning energy and resources and thus to facilitate cooperation among industry academia and governmental sectors for coping with the problems in this field."

On Wednesday, the UK Register published a translation of the Society's January report which for some reason America's global warming-obsessed press chose to ignore:

A rocket carrying a NASA satellite designed to study global warming crashed into the ocean near Antarctica Tuesday shortly after being launched from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base.

How delicious that it landed near the continent whose expanding ice mass totally defies the myth climate alarmists so eagerly spread for their own purposes.

Talk about your inconvenient truths.

As Bloomberg reported moments ago, the satellite cost $273 million:

NASA's James Hansen has created an advertisement for a protest at the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C., on March 2.

In the piece, Hansen claims:

We cannot burn all the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet. The only practical way to solve the problem is to phase out the biggest source of carbon and that is coal.

Is this what someone working for the United States government and paid with our tax dollars should be doing (video embedded below the fold):

I'll betcha this won't get much notice in the Obamedia, so it needs some here.

Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe's Environment and Public Works Committee Press Blog released a statement last night reporting that Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of over-the-top global warming alarmist James Hansen, has publicly rebuked his former employee's conduct, refuted Hansen's comedic claim that he was being muzzled, and has joined the ranks of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) skeptics.

Hansen's histrionics were last noted on January 18 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) when the UK Guardian carried his dire warning that the about-to-be-inaugurated Barack Obama "Has Four Years to Save Earth" from the impact of global warming.

Here are key excerpts from the press release posted by Marc Morano (HT Watts Up With That via Tigerhawk; bolds are mine):

The next time some media member says something stupid like "the global warming debate is over," or "the science is settled," consider the firestorm that was set off by a tiny NewsBusters article playfully titled "Clean Air Causes Global Warming, Global Warming Causes Smog."

Although it is now two weeks since this was first published, folks at NewsBusters and RealClimate -- as well as an "esteemed" NASA scientist -- continue to bicker about its contents and meaning.

In fact, as of Thursday evening, NASA's Gavin Schmidt was still battling to make his point:

Updates at end of post: Schmidt responds to (and ignores!) NBers' questions.

Last Saturday, one of the nation's leading climate alarmists -- a government employee with a history of attacking people that don't agree with his views on anthropogenic global warming -- wrote rather disparagingly about a somewhat satirical NewsBusters piece.

Despite claiming he typically doesn’t comment on things “written about climate change in the more excitable parts of [sic] web,” NASA’s Gavin Schmidt took time out of his busy Saturday schedule to respond to something he described as “probably the most boneheaded article that I have seen in ages.”

Was this an effort by one of the founding members of RealClimate – the world’s leading website specializing in climate change hysteria – to correct errors he felt existed in my article? Or, was this a predictable attack on a popular conservative blog that not only regularly exposes the one-sided nature of media reports about global warming, but also frequently brings attention to studies that go counter to RealClimate’s, and maybe more importantly, Schmidt’s views?

After all, to climate alarmists like Schmidt, media shouldn’t be reporting the realist (nee “skeptical”) side of this issue as was made perfectly clear by Nobel Laureate Al Gore during an interview with NBC’s Meredith Vieira during the November 5, 2007, installment of the “Today” show (photo via NPR):

Although it seems like just yesterday, Monday marks the 20th anniversary of the day James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told members of Congress the world was doomed if the burning of fossil fuels didn't immediately cease.

To commemorate this inauspicious occasion, Hansen is going back to Capitol Hill to call for oil company executives to be put on trial for crimes against humanity and nature.

Can you imagine the media firestorm this is going to create?

Critical update: Audio of Hansen discussing this with NPR's Diane Rehm available here (h/t Anthony Watts).

While you ponder, the following was reported by England's Guardian Monday (emphasis added):

Fortunately, most people will likely be watching the Giants-Packers game Sunday evening, and will therefore miss the one-sided hysteria.

However, for those that mysteriously don't switch channels after the Chargers-Patriots game, CBS will offer a special about global warming this Sunday instead of "60 Minutes."

How marvelous.

The CBS News website hysterically described this installment of "The Age of Warming":

Is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration filled with climate change deniers?

Such seems likely to be alleged by hysterical alarmists in the press when and if they read a new study out of NASA which determined that "not all the large changes seen in Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming."

Goes quite counter to all the recent media reports, as well as assertions by Nobel Laureate Al Gore, that low ice conditions in the Arctic are all the fault of that despicable -- albeit essential to life and naturally occurring! -- gas carbon dioxide.

Of course, it's quite unlikely many climate alarmists will even hear about this study, for today's green media wouldn't want to do anything that destroys their illusion that there's a scientific consensus regarding this matter.

As such, consider yourself fortunate to be apprised of the highlights (emphasis added throughout):

CNN’s special “worldwide investigation” “Planet in Peril,” in two segments looking at the debate amongst politicians and scientists on whether climate change is a man-made phenomenon, failed to mention that NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen [pictured at right], one the scientists featured in the second segment, has received funding from George Soros, while mentioning that “second biggest contributors to [global warming skeptic Senator James] Inhofe's Senate office are energy and natural resource companies.”

The first segment, which began 8 minutes into the 10 pm Eastern hour of Wednesday night’s program, examined the political debate over climate change, focusing on “the loudest voice” of Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe. CNN correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta introduced the segment by referring back to the previous segments of “Planet in Peril,” which looked at the impact of climate change in different parts of the world. “From what we’ve seen in Greenland, Alaska, and Africa, the Earth's climate is clearly changing. It's not a theory. It's a fact. But what's causing those changes? The majority of the scientific community says it's mankind. But there are powerful voices who say otherwise.”

As NewsBuster Jake Gontesky reported, an editorial in Investor's Business Daily Monday claimed one of billionaire leftist George Soros's foundations gave $720,000 in 2006 to the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen.

Since this editorial was published, according to LexisNexis and Google News searches, not one major media outlet has reported these allegations.

Maybe even more shocking is that had press outlets looked into this matter - you know, acted like journalists instead of advocates! - they would have found Hansen's name prominently mentioned in the 2006 Soros Foundations Network Report (relevant section on page 123):

Since NASA's James Hansen finally released computer codes related to how climate data are collected and adjusted, anthropogenic global warming skeptics around the world have been waiting to see what a scientific examination of this information would produce.

On Monday, Canada's Steve McIntyre, who himself debunked Michael Mann's ridiculous "Hockey Stick" theory as well as identified Hansen's Y2K bug, released information identifying that Hansen recently made additional changes to climate data akin to how companies like Enron used creative accounting to exaggerate earnings and defraud investors.

As published at Climate Audit moments ago (emphasis added, h/t Anthony Watts):

Much as when the organization he leads quietly made changes to the United States historical climate record at the prodding of Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre, James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies finally released critical computer codes scientists have wanted for years, but did so with absolutely no official press release.

As a result, not one media outlet covered this occurrence that years from now could be seen as a huge turning point in the climate change debate.

Despite the secrecy, there was great celebration amongst anthropogenic global warming skeptics that have wanted these closely held codes to be able to identify how NASA and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration make adjustments to raw climate data collected by weather stations.

One such skeptic is Anthony Watts, who happily reported Saturday (emphasis added):

On Tuesday, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration announced that "Greenhouse gases likely accounted for more than half of the widespread warmth across the continental United States last year."

Yet, NOAA ignored the fact that the primary GHG global warming alarmists point to as the cause for rising temperatures, carbon dioxide emissions, actually declined in 2006.

How did they miss that little detail?

Regardless, let's first look at the announcement from NOAA (emphasis added):