Heat And Retreat

Amy Ridenour provides a case study of how the legacy media covers global warming:

When University of Washington Professor Eric Steig announced in a news conference and paper published in the January 22 edition of the journal Nature that he and several colleagues had removed one of many thorns in the sides of climate alarmists — in this case, evidence that Antarctica is cooling — he received extensive worldwide attention in the mainstream press.

But when a noteworthy error was found in Stieg’s research less than two weeks after it’s publication, of the mainstream press, only an opinion column in the London Telegraph and a blog associated with the Australian Herald Sun carried the news.

The Stieg paper’s release was covered by 27 newspapers, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times, by CNN, by the Associated Press, by NPR and quite a few others (see reviews of the coverage at the end of this post).

After independent analyst Steve McIntyre discovered a noteworthy error in the data, and released his results on his influential blog Climate Audit beginning on February 1, based on a Nexis search I conducted February 6, none of these outlets chose to inform their readers.

Of course, such biased “reporting” followed by much less visible retractions isn’t just limited to global warming, but many other pet causes of the left–such as this media meme, to reference but one.

Hey, somebody should do a video about this topic!