Topic: The Media
Some people wonder how an empty suit like Barack Obama could possibly have been elected President of the United States. Surely the American people are smarter than that! Well, as Winston Churchill once remarked, the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. And no, I don’t mean that people are generally stupid. But they are generally ill-informed and for that the news media deserve a supersized share of the blame.
Liberals, progressives and lefties squeal with outrage at every error or omission of Fox News Channel, which they claim isn’t a legitimate news organization at all but the Republican Party’s propaganda machine. (This, incidentally, makes it OK for the Left to indulge its taste for misogyny by mocking and stereotyping the women of FNC as dumb blondes, bimbos and worse.) Ah, but when evidence surfaces that a supposedly genuine news organization has been somewhat less than fair and balanced they’ll say just about anything to change the subject. Example: During an exchange of comments on Quora I mentioned the CBS/Dan Rather debacle—only to be told that Rather’s transgression was nothing compared to those of Chimpy McBushitler and Darth Vadercheney, so there! And I have to say, that prize piece of idiocy absolutely made my day.
So I’m wondering how the Left will respond when this is pointed out to them. It’s ABC’s 2008 weather forecast, in which the network informed us that by 2015—that’s right now—climate disaster will have overtaken the world. In a one-hour special, “Earth 2100,” (produced in 2008 but not aired until 2009) ABC informed its viewers that by 2015 global warming will have caused economic chaos and widespread natural disasters—gas $9 a gallon, milk $13 a gallon, Miami wiped out by a superstorm, New York disappearing beneath rising seawater, etc. Peering further ahead, ABC saw a huge human dieback with global population falling to less than 3 billion. Sample scare quote: “We're going to see more floods, more droughts, more wildfires.”
If you look out the window you’ll note that none of ABC’s dire predictions have come to pass. I don’t buy milk by the gallon so I’m not sure of its price but I do know that if I fill up today I’ll be paying about $2.75 rather than $9 for a gallon of gas. And though I haven’t checked this morning I’m pretty certain that both Miami and New York are still there. In short, “Earth 2100” wasn’t scientifically rigorous good reporting or even a serious exercise in prognostication. It was climate alarmism, pure and simple—a specimen of propaganda that would have excited the admiration of Joseph Goebbels.
Now recall for a moment how the media treated presidential candidate Barack H. Obama in 2007-08. Though it’s true that media coverage of Obama had its ups and downs it was very positive on the whole. There was, indeed, scant inclination to question Obama’s fitness for office on grounds of experience and temperament. While the straight journalism side of the media didn’t succumb to the adulation and hero worship in which he basked, news coverage was certainly influenced by those over-the-top hosannas. Perhaps too it was colored by reporters’ reluctance to take shots at America’s first serious black presidential candidate. Whatever the reason, though, they didn’t ask the hard questions. And the American people received, as we can see now, a totally false impression of Barack Obama. The candidate they voted for was a wooden titan. The real guy turned out to be a small, tiny person.
As with candidates, so with the climate. In the fantasy land of climate alarmists and their numerous media enablers, disaster is always just around the corner. In the real world, though, things are quite different. In recent years it’s become more and more evident that we know a lot less than we thought we did about the dynamics of the planetary climate. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Al Gore School of Climate Catastrophe, ABC’s apparent inspiration, has been outed as malarkey, baloney, twaddle, rot, stuff and nonsense. So if you watched “Earth 2100” in 2009 and were frightened by it, well, I regret to inform you that you’ve been misinformed. Again. And not by Fox News Channel.
