Since we have a biased media on important public policy issues, it is really up to conservative groups to try to get alternative information into the national debate. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), headed by Fred Smith, is doing just that. It is filling the void on the media’s failure to present both sides of the global warming debate by running ads directly confronting media bias. One of CEI’s targets is a Time cover story urging people to be “very worried” about global warming. As CEI suggests, we should really be worried about slanted journalism that doesn’t have enough faith in people to enable them to make up their own minds.
CEI has also taken on Al Gore, the star of his own new movie on global warming, by noting that Gore used a lot of jet fuel to fly around the country warning people about the greenhouse gases that he helped produce. The hilarious CEI ad on this is titled “Al Gore’s Big, Fat Carbon Footprint.”
In terms of the major media, John Stossel of ABC News is probably the only reporter for the major broadcast networks who takes the time to offer any information contradicting the notion that we are in the midst of man-made global warming and that it threatens a major global catastrophe. Stossel was at the CEI annual dinner on May 23 and received the Julian Simon Award, named for the intellectual giant who disputed the no-growth doomsayers whose previous predictions were proven false. Stossel’s new book, Myths, Lies, and Outright Stupidity, includes a section on global warming. He concludes that warming is occurring but that there’s no hard evidence to link it to human activity. He also concludes that a U.N. treaty can’t stop or fix it.
Fortunately, Fox News has finally come through with a program offering different perspectives on the topic. It had come in for intense conservative criticism for having turned over an hour of airtime to liberal activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to promote his alarmist and near-hysterical view. The May 21 FNC special, hosted by David Asman, was called “Global Warming: The Debate Continues.” He said, “Today, almost all scientists agree that there is global warming, but there is no scientific consensus about what causes global warming or how it will affect our lives.”
Among others, the show included Senator James Inhofe calling man-made global warming a hoax. Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Inhofe has delivered several important speeches on this subject. One of his most important can be found here.
On the Fox show, Inhofe noted that Time magazine, which is now warning of global warming, once warned of a new ice age.
Why don’t those on the left want to accept the likelihood that warming and cooling are natural cycles over which humans have no influence or control? If that was the case, then new government solutions, including global treaties like the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol, wouldn’t be necessary. Sounding the alarm over a problem that may not exist also gives liberals the chance to appear compassionate. For the media, it’s another opportunity to implement the liberal agenda and sell magazines and papers.
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