False Balance Lives: Bloomberg News Gives Equal Weight To Climate Disinformer And Scientists

[kristopher]

False Balance Lives: Bloomberg News Gives Equal Weight To Climate Disinformer And Scientists
By Joe Romm on May 14, 2013 at 12:25 pm



False balance is alive and well at even the best media outlets (see links below). Bloomberg news, famous for the post-Sandy cover story,“It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” now proves they can be the stupid ones, in a Monday piece on “Greenhouse Gases Hit Threshold Unseen in 3 Million Years”:

Happy Plants
“The Earth has had many-times-higher levels of CO2 in the past,” said Marc Morano, former spokesman for Republican Senator James Inhofe and executive editor of Climate Depot, a blog that posts articles skeptical of climate change. “Americans should welcome the 400 parts-per-million threshold. This means that plants are going to be happy, and this means that global-warming fearmongers are going to be proven wrong.”

Yes, “Happy Plants” is Bloomberg’s header. Plants will be so damn happy when it is 10° F warmer and a third of the arable land has been turned to dust bowl!
And yes, Bloomberg actually quoted Marc Morano, the Charlie Sheen of global warming, former denier-in-chief for Sen. James Inhofe (R-OIL) — “among the first reporters to write about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign.”
As Media Matters notes, you should know your news article is pushing false balance when you are quoting someone making the exact same argument as a “rock bottom” Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Marc Morano is not a scientist and has no scientific education. He is paid by an oil-industry funded organization to confuse the public about climate change, and has compared climate science to the Mayan calendar, Nostradamus, and medieval witchcraft. Moreover, his argument is laughable: by focusing on how carbon dioxide stimulates plant growth in a controlled environment, he ignores that our huge emissions of it and other greenhouse gases are warming up the planet, thereby increasing the risk of extreme rainfall and drought to the detriment of agriculture. A Wall Street Journal op-ed made the same argument on Thursday, leading to a deluge of condemnation.
So why is Bloomberg News not ...

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/14/2008601/false-balance-lives-bloomberg-news-gives-equal-weight-to-climate-disinformer-and-scientists/

[hatrack]

1. "The Charlie Sheen of Global Warming' - Hah! Genius!