Fresh off his Oscar coronation, Al Gore is stepping up his jihad against global warming skeptics by continuing his campaign to stop the media from covering their viewpoint at all.
In a speech delivered Tuesday, Gore blasted media organizations for giving any credence at all to people who see things differently than him on global warming. The former veep denounced what he termed "balance as bias" in environment reporting:
Gore told a crowd of about 50 people at the U.S. Media Ethics Summit II that the presentation's single most provocative slide was one that contrasts results of two long-term studies. A 10-year University of California study found that essentially zero percent of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles disagreed that global warming exists, whereas, another study found that 53 percent of mainstream newspaper articles disagreed the global warming premise.
He noted that recently the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its fourth unanimous report calling on world leaders to take action on global warming.
"I believe that is one of the principal reasons why political leaders around the world have not yet taken action," Gore said. "There are many reasons, but one of the principal reasons in my view is more than half of the mainstream media have rejected the scientific consensus implicitly — and I say 'rejected,' perhaps it's the wrong word. They have failed to report that it is the consensus and instead have chosen … balance as bias.
"I don't think that any of the editors or reporters responsible for one of these stories saying, 'It may be real, it may not be real,' is unethical. But I think they made the wrong choice, and I think the consequences are severe.
"I think if it is important to look at the pressures that made it more likely than not that mainstream journalists in the United States would convey a wholly inaccurate conclusion about the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced."
Not very many people showed up, but Gore's remarks are significant in that they demonstrate that for all the (usually correct) complaints people on the right make about the media being unfair, things have gotten better to a certain degree to make far left people like Al Gore complain about the media.
That's a small progress to be sure (imagine the media outcry that would ensue if a conservative figure had used such authoritarian language) but I think it's true that many younger media types have gotten a clue about fairness. This enrages the older lefties (like Gore or Dan Rather) who are used to the idea of a media that marginalizes the right and portrays anything remotely conservative as an incarnation of evil.
