American Media Overlook Missing Intelligence On Weapons Of Mass Decline

I’ve linked a bunch of times to Julia Goren’s 2006 essay in the Christian Science Monitor noting that for the left of the mid-naughts, global warming served as their moral equivalent (to coin a phrase) to the War on Terror. As Julia wrote back then:

It’s a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming – at least that’s what some would have us believe.Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. “I really consider this a national security issue,” says celebrity activist and “An Inconvenient Truth” producer Laurie David. “Truth” star Al Gore calls global warming a “planetary emergency.” Bill Clinton’s first worry is climate change: “It’s the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it.”

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can’t deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it’s Kyoto that’ll save you.

With “Another American media failure,” Ed Morrissey has a must-read post today at Hot Air that spots another way in which they’re intertwined:

In the years after the the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent failure to find WMD, the American media flagellated itself publicly over its lack of skepticism of Bush administration cassus belli claims.  We endured reams of essays about the supine nature of the corporate-owned media, the supposed disinformation campaign of the White House, the “lies” on WMD claims (that had also been made by Democrats in Congress from 1998 until the invasion), and so on.  To this day, the American media still considers their self-described blind acceptance of claims about intelligence without sufficient investigation as an indictment on their industry — and a consequence of the Internet-driven changes to the media market.

After wearing sackcloth and ashes for so long, one might believe that the American national media would leap at the chance to show its newfound mission of skepticism and challenge to authority.  Unfortunately, US journalists have missed a grand opportunity to demonstrate that it learned a lesson about swallowing a story from the government without question, if indeed that is what happened in 2002 on Iraq.  We know this because their colleagues across the pond in the United Kingdom have not missed the chance to speak a little truth to power, both in their own government and to multilateral organizations that issued faulty analyses, false data, bad research, and hysterical demands for action.

Do I refer to our military efforts in Afghanistan?  In Pakistan?  Fiscal policy among the G-20?  No.  The Australian and British press have eaten the American media’s lunch on the collapse of credibility at the IPCC and in the anthropogenic global-warming (AGW) movement.  In the past four months, media outlets like the Times of London, the Telegraph, the Australian Herald-Sun, and even the Left-leaning paper The Guardian have broken important stories (along with bloggers) exposing the fraud, mismanagement, and unscientific behavior of the core group of AGW advocates, such as:

Followed by quite a lengthy list of no-longer-hidden decline, after which Ed notes:

None of these — none — were exposed by a major American media outlet.  The efforts of the American press, with a couple of rare exceptions such as the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal, have mainly been to play down the significance of every revelation and to emphasize their view of scientific AGW “consensus.”  When the Washington Post finally got around to reporting on the East Anglia scandal, it provided only a straightforward but superficial recounting of the journalism done in the UK and Australia.  The New York Times didn’t even bother to do that much, saying that the collapse of the basis of Obama administration policy didn’t amount to a “three-alarm story.”

Click over to read the rest.