Two Time-Warners in One!

“CNN’s media critic: Journalists shouldn’t ‘give equal time’ to global warming skeptics,” Jamie Weinstein writes at the Daily Caller:

CNN’s senior media correspondent says there’s no need for journalists to provide a voice to those who question global warming or the threat it poses.

“Let’s begin with an important journalistic statement,” Brian Stelter declared Sunday on his show, CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” “Some stories don’t have two sides. Some stories are simply true. There’s no necessity to give equal time to the ‘other side.’ One of these is climate change. Depending on which study or which expert you consult, between 95 and 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is happening now, that it’s damaging the planet and that’s it’s manmade. That seems pretty definitive, right?”

True to his opening “important journalistic statement,” Stelter then gave the floor to two guests who agreed with his position.

This actually isn’t a new development; in  2007, Editor & Publisher magazine, the house organ of the establishment “liberal” MSM demanded in an article headlined, “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers.” Of course, as we’ve seen in the years since from their coverage of Mr. Obama, their shilling for his namesake socialized medicine scheme, and their attacks on the Constitution, particularly the Second Amendment, the MSM’s abandonment of objectivity extends far beyond environmental issues.

But junking objectivity on environmentalism at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO actually goes much further back; in 1990, Insight magazine had an article titled “The Tribal Filter on Green News” with the following passage, which was preserved in PDF form by blogger Sissy Willis a decade ago:

Only lately have the pooh-bahs of the national press felt secure enough to admit publicly that they filter the news through their personal-tribal creed. As a result, of course, they often report as fact that which is both unsettled and disputed.

. . . At a conference on the environment in Washington earlier this year, reported by The Wall Street Journal’s David Brooks, Charles Alexander* harrumphed:

“As the science editor at Time I would freely admit that on this issue we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy.” There was applause from the pressies in conclave assembled, after which Andrea Mitchell, an NBC correspondent, said that “clearly the networks have made the decision now, where you’d have to call it advocacy.”

Regarding Brian Stelter at CNN specifically, particularly given the rules established by his predecessors at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO, why should I believe someone who couldn’t convince his colleagues down the hall of the crisis he perceives first, before trying to convince the rest of us? If Sports Illustrated, which is part of the conglomerate that owns CNN is willing to expend the enormous carbon footprint of a converted Boeing jet passenger plane merely to shoot photos of Kate Upton and her two friends bouncing around in zero gravity, then there’s no reason for anyone else to be alarmed about the horrors of global cooling, global warming, climate change, climate chaos, or however it’s being branded by Time-Warner-CNN-HBO this week.

* Long since retired from Time, Alexander is still in the chicken little business, railing against Americans “destroying” the planet, via the air-conditioned server farm of the Huffington Post.