NY Times Gives Platform To Global Warming Distorters

The "liberal" New York Times published a blatantly biased attack piece on Al Gore and his movie An Inconvenient Truth. RealClimate.org does the debunking (so that I can be lazy):

Broad Irony

The first rule when criticizing popular science presentations for inaccuracies should be to double check any 'facts' you use. It is rather ironic then that William Broad's latest piece on Al Gore plays just as loose with them as he accuses Gore of doing.

We criticized William Broad previously (Broadly Misleading) for a piece that misrepresented the scientific understanding of the factors that drive climate change over millions of years, systematically understating the scientifically-established role of greenhouse gases, and over-stating the role of natural factors including those as speculative as cosmic rays (see our recent discussion here). In this piece, Broad attempts to discredit Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" by exaggerating the legitimate, but minor, criticisms of his treatment of the science by experts on climate science, and presenting specious or unsubstantiated criticisms by a small number of the usual, well-known contrarians who wouldn't agree even if Gore read aloud from the latest IPCC report.

This RealClimate.org article is really good. Click the link. Read the whole article. Educate yourself. It is worth it.

If the NY Times were really liberal or had higher journalistic integrity they would not have printed Broad's right-wing propaganda. To recompense for this error, they should retract Broad's article and print the RealClimate.org article.

That probably won't happen, but that is why the real liberal media, the countless liberal and progressive blogs (like mine), are trying to restore truth and balance.

Truth has a liberal bias as Stephen Colbert would say. While he was being ironic, many on the Right have, whether ignoranly or deliberately, come to that absurd conclusion, and decades of the Right repeating "the liberal media" myth has turned that myth into a religion for right-wingers and an influential scare tactic to the traditional media. By incessantly claiming the traditional media has a liberal bias, the Right has managed to pull an already balanced media off to the right. Through that and other similar tactics, they have moved the entire political debate further to the right by deceitfully demanding that the Right is the Center, the Center is the Left, and the Left is crazy and outside the mainstream.

Such deceit has wrought heavy damage to our country to the point that there became a need for blogs like DailyKos, MyDD, TalkingPointsMemo, Firedoglake, ThinkProgress, CrooksAndLiars. They, in turn, inspired many, many smaller blogs like mine. Our numbers are growing, and as our cause grows we will acheive success in repairing the political damage to our country and, eventually, the environmental damage to our world.