On Saturday’s Fox News Watch on FNC, regular panel member Jim Pinkerton of the conservative New America Foundation corrected fellow panel member Douglas Kennedy – an FNC correspondent and son of former New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy – as Kennedy asserted that "you don't have to be a scientist to know that the world is getting hotter," and that "that's objective reporting to say that the world is getting hotter."
Pinkerton responded: "Actually, it’s inaccurate reporting to say that. The world has been cooling since 1998."
Earlier, Pinkerton also seemed to pick up on a Newsbusters posting by the MRC’s Geoffrey Dickens as he cited a polar photographer who appeared as a guest on Thursday's Today show on NBC and declared that the debate over global warming is over. Pinkerton also alluded to a story by ABC's Jake Tapper which ran on Thursday's World News in which clips of drought and flooding were shown during a soundbite of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown talking about climate change.
Below is a transcript of relevant portions of the Saturday, December 19, Fox News Watch on FNC:
JIM PINKERTON, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION: If the choice is between corrupt politics and corrupt science, I’ll take neither. I’ll say let’s just not throw our economy down the toilet based on some theory. But, meanwhile, the media are showing their bias more thickly than any other issue I can think of. You mentioned the NBC report where a photographer taking cute pictures of walruses and seals and so on, is there brought on as a climate expert, saying, see, I’ve taken a photograph of a seal, that proves climate change is real, we’ve got to do something about it.
And then ABC News had Gordon Brown, the prime minister of England, talking about how we have to do something about climate, and they cut in B-roll of floods and hurricanes and disasters and so on. I mean, it’s like they’re making little movies in advancing their agenda.
...
DOUGLAS KENNEDY, FNC CORRESPONDENT: I don’t pretend to understand, I’m not a scientist. I know the polar ice caps are melting. I mean, you don’t have to be a scientist to know that the world is getting hotter. I can’t believe there are still people, I mean, I thought we had gone through this and, you know, gotten past people still that-
PINKERTON: Actually, the world has been cooling since-
KENNEDY: I don’t think it’s -- that’s objective reporting to say that the world is getting hotter.
PINKERTON: Actually, it’s inaccurate reporting to say that. The world has been cooling since 1998.
