Indian media -asses covering asses of other asses

It's not just me that gets the impression that Rajdeep Sardesai, the top honcho of CNN-IBN,  is trying to distract us from probing deeper into the ethical woes of his media colleagues. His latest column is like pointing at the sky and saying -look a pink elephant! while the rat of journalism sneaks by. Or, as the neglected TV film reporter Smita Smitten, Showbiz Kitten used to say in the delightful comedy Goodness Gracious Me to divert viewers from her woes- "Look, there goes Art Malik!"

I won't bother to fisk the article-I'm too tired now and tomorrow is another day - but comments below the column have done that to an extent already, some in a cruder way than I would have. Some samples -

Looking in the mirror is for others

Over at the Hindustan Times Samar Halarnkar ponders over the dodgy ethics of his many allegedly distinguished media colleagues as exposed in the Radia tapes and gives us this eternal wisdom of the heavens-

It is always hardest to look within and acknowledge one's failings. 

Ironical.

This blog has at various times analyzed and criticized the highly biased "reporting" in this paper by none other than Halarnkar himself. For example see this and this. It was sheer advocacy of an agenda -hardcore environmentalist agenda in this case - that masqueraded as "news" and such is the media world so hermetically sealed in its perceived intellectual superiority and arrogance that neither Halarnkar nor his editors could make out the difference between belief systems and facts. In the few emails and comments we exchanged he simply laughed off all criticism.

I guess media persons do find it hard to look in the mirror. Either that or their mirror is frosted.

Rich kickings

Reading John Hinderaker one realizes how easy and enjoyable it is to kick Frank Rich around.Rich will obviously not appreciate the treatment John gives him nor this great advice-

You really shouldn't read the New York Times. It has lower editorial standards than any other newspaper in America, and if you read it enough, it could make you stupid. Like Frank Rich.

Read the whole thing. A thorough take down of an idiot-pundit, the kind that infect the media all over.

The fake universe of a cartoonist

Ravi Shankar is one of those cartoonists who just by the dint of being there for a long time become 'eminent'. He has an interesting style of drawing -but even a monkey can draw with practice. The art of cartooning has to with being genuinely funny, witty, sharp, intelligent, perspicacious...and Ravi Shankar is hardly ever that. He is also a moral idiot-

A morally obtuse Ravi Shankar cartoon, the Hindustan Times, 16 Feb,2010

According to this supposedly funny man-

Saddam was hanged on fake evidence

Sure, Ravi, it was all faked -

Saddam trial: villagers tell of the day the planes came

Kurdish villagers gave a series of emotional testimonies today in Saddam Hussein's genocide trial as they told of how the Iraqi dictator’s forces bombarded civilian villages with poisonous gas.

On the second day of the trial, after a chaotic opening in which Saddam refused to state his name or enter a plea, witnesses began to detail the savagery of the Anfal campaign which ran from 1987-88.

The prosecution alleges that up to 182,000 civilians were killed in air strikes, poison gas attacks and armed sweeps by Iraqi forces through designated "prohibited zones" in Kurdish regions.

------------------------
"On April 16, 1987 in the evening as the cattle were returning home and the sun was setting in the sky, about eight to 12 jets covered the sky," he began.

"The jets started firing on the villages of Belisand and Sheikwasan. The explosions were not very loud.

"There was greenish smoke from the bombs. It was if there was a rotten apple or garlic smell minutes later. People were vomiting... we were blind and screaming. There was no one to rescue us. Just God," he said.

Prosecutors said that a series of eight campaigns between February and August 1988 were aimed at driving Kurds from their homes into "collective villages" where Iraqi authorities could monitor them. Those who did not die in the military attacks were arrested, displaced, tortured or killed, the court was told.

You are right, Ravi, this never happened-

The Kurdish victims caught unaware by cyanide

It's all a fake, really. They are just playing dead to help those evil Americans hang that misunderstood angel named Saddam-

Genocide by Saddam -never happened!

Times of India -spinning so hard that the head muddles

Even as the Hindustan Times' climate alarmism has cooled down(at least for now), the Times of India, India's other major daily, is spinning furiously.These are the fanatics who even as their temple collapses around them will chose not to run but to congregate around the altar and keep chanting the mantra. Their full page hit-piece on skeptics has to be seen to be believed-

Click for a larger image

Shobhan Saxena in "On Thin Ice" tries to sound neutral but cannot keep up it up long- it's too hard to play the objective writer so he ends up with-

Experts fear all these controversies may end up sabotaging a possible climate treaty. The key is to try to get a legally binding treaty, securing no more than a two-degree rise in temperature. The problem is we are working in the wrong framework, says Monbiot. Its not likely to improve the situation.

Yes, Shoban, we knew all along where you were coming from.


Then there is an anguished piece by Chidanand Rajghatta lamenting that the noble Obama is being held back by political opponents and lobbyists from imposing that wonderful and magical Cap and Trade on the unwilling citizens.



At the center of the page, the ALL FACT, NO FICTION column is the funniest section, unintentionally of course.It's hard to find a fact here but it has such precious gems as-

FACT 1 | Heat waves rising. The commonest sign of climate change. There have been periods of warming, cooling over the last 5 billion years but the change has never been so extreme

Wrong!

FACT 2 | Shrinking glaciers. At the current rate of warming, all existing glaciers will disappear in the next 100 years

Even after Glaciergate the TOI believes this -amazing! Maybe they never got to the 2350 thing. Anyway, as I said earlier -2035 or 2350, who cares as long as they can cling to their pet narrative.Or maybe climate change has changed the concepts of math -2350 will fall within 100 years. Anything can happen in post-modern science.

FACT 3 | Rising sea level. Has increased by 25cm in last 100 years; will rise 4 times in next 100. Many Pacific islands will disappear

Really?

FACT 4 | Wild storms. Occurring more frequently & with higher intensity. Result: Soil moisture will evaporate faster resulting in dryness between rain periods. Dry areas will get drier

 Again wrong!Actually - Global hurricane, cyclonic and major storm activity is near 30-year lows!

BLACK TIDINGS: A Nasa Earth Observatory image shows the spread of black soot (‘black carbon’ to climate scientists) over the Tibetan Plateau from August to November 2009. Places where the air was thick with soot are white, while lower concentrations are transparent purple. On the Tibetan Plateau, temperatures are rising and glaciers are melting faster than climate scientists would expect based on global warming alone. A recent study of ice cores from five Tibetan glaciers by Nasa and Chinese scientists confirmed the likely culprit: rapid increases in black soot concentrations since the 1990s, mostly from air pollution sources over Asia, especially the Indian subcontinent

But wait -doesn't that indicate there are causes and forces apart from CO2 that could and do impact the climate? Even more forcefully than CO2, as in this case? It weakens TOI's own case of AGW. Maybe they didn't realize it, maybe spinning so fast makes one's head turn.Thinking clearly is difficult in such circumstances.



To wrap it up we have standard alarmist fare from Jennifer L Morgan,director, Climate and Energy Program, World Resources Institute, Washington DC. Yes the same World Resources Institute that is an extreme leftist NGO-

Anti-capitalist think tank which is funded with taxpayer dollars

This is as bad as IPCC citing 'research' from WWF publications.

There are people who still live far, far away from civilization, in some deep cave in a remote place. Somehow the TOI manages to find them and gives them large space in it's paper.



Update- 
        oops! should have mentioned that this is the Sunday Times of India, 31st Jan, Delhi edition.
Update 2- 
        oops! my head must be reeling from all the TOI spin. Corrected the above date from the 30th to the 31st Jan.

Prannoy Roy to Pachauri-"Your credibility is impeccable"

In Hindi, a sycophant is called a chamcha. Chamcha is also the Hindi word for spoon. Thus, a common wordplay in India is to call a bootlicker(often in the context of politics) a spoon, say-

X is Minister Y's spoon.

A few days ago I was mildly amused to see perhaps Indian TV's most famous (and perhaps most influential) personality Prannoy Roy of NDTV play a fawning spoon to Rajendra Pachauri.I say 'mildly' because I have come to expect such servility from the MSM- it is their normal mode.Still, it's an amazing example of media's obsequiousness towards Pachauri.No wonder Pachauri gets miffed easily when criticized. He has had it so easy over the years.

Video(Youtube) -Prannoy Roy acts obsequiously towards Rajendra Pachauri
NDTV link

 Roy wanted to be reassured by Pachauri that the glaciers were melting, whatever the expected date of demise(it is true -certainty of disaster does comfort some people. The thought that catastrophic global warming might not be happening can disconcert them.)

The funniest part is Prannoy Roy's concern about 'Global Attack' on Pachauri.He thinks criticizing Pachauri and other alarmists is like finding "reds under the bed", like "cold war".I don't think Roy is very interested in hearing out the critics.
His 'Global Attack' also reminded me of images from all those sci-fi movies-

Listening to Roy one can almost imagine Richard North and other Pachauri critics to be hovering in the sky like Predator drones zapping IPCC scientists.And looking for Dr. Pachauri in particular.

Roy's fawning at the end has to be heard to be believed. He says-
"Your credibility is impeccable.Let's hope you fight back and win and clear your name in all these...in this widespread attack from one side against you."

Roy also didn't think it fit to disclose that his NDTV has been in bed with Pachauri for quite some time-

Rajendra Pachauri with Prannoy Roy- the guru and the spoon

Thank you, Dr.Prannoy Roy, for a seminal lesson in how not to be an unbiased mediaperson.


Update -
      Autonomous Mind has more

Making Samar Halarnkar suffer a little more

I had earlier left a comment at Carbon Footprint, a Hindustan Times blog by the resident alarmist Samar Halarnkar. To which he had replied-

Samar Halarnkar Says:
December 23rd, 2009 at 8:33 pm

Er, I don’t really get your point. This isn’t a newspaper. it’s a blog. It has a point of view because it is meant to have one. The newspaper reports didn’t take any sides, just brought to you the nitty gritties of what happened in Copenhagen. As you suffered me, I suffer you. :-) cheers

My riposte is the following two comments left at the same blog post-

Samar,
I mainly meant your 'reports' in the HT.They are not blog, are they?

"The newspaper reports didn’t take any sides" -nice try at humor.Better luck next time.

I suppose it is the destiny of a newspaper man to suffer his readers -tells us much about the attitude.

By the way, why all quiet on the climate change front? You and Chetan Chauhan been very quiet these last few days -no screaming 'reports' on a world dying of human sins. As they say in Spanish -¿Qué Pasa? Planet not in peril anymore?

You must scaremonger soon -I find this tongue-tiedness creepy. It's not you.

By the way I congratulate your paper on not suppressing this study-
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091230184221.htm

Gives a hint to how much the computer models on which the global warming alarmism is based get it wrong.

I hope the new year brings you happiness and wisdom.

Cheers

And-

Oh! forgot to mention -

You have been ignoring Pachaurigate( Pachauri's scandalous conflicts of interest) as if he were the mayor of Timbuktu.
Apart from an initial report -very inadequate and leaning towards Pachauri -where are your investigations? Whatever happened to investigative reporting? The conflicts of interest are glaring to even a blind mouse- what about you and your editors?

Why not suck up a little less and ferret a little more? Won't hurt. Just try.

Start here if you wish-
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-american.html

and follow the links. Like I said- won't hurt anything but your sensibilities. And that can be good once in a while.

Note -links added.
Update-
     the very first link corrected.

Update 2-
     I'm not a nice person. I just had to rub it in. So I left a third comment!

Sorry to make you suffer just a little more but-

how do you expect to atone for your sin of flying to Copenhagen and back and in the process being responsible for several tons of CO2 emissions?

I apologize if you walked -or took a sailing ship.

What's the matter with me?

Update 3-
         Oh no! I left a fourth comment-

Travel to Coorg?
Isn’ t that more CO2 emissions?

Why can’t the gentleman stay at home and emit less?The planet is dying, isn’t it?

Isn’t it strange that those who shout the loudest about CO2 emissions have an extra large carbon footprint?
Is it too much to expect them to live up to their own ideals?

I'm positively a bastard!

Environmentalism -wrecking young brains

What the environmentalists are doing to the children(with dollops of help from the media and the state) is nothing short of child abuse.Frank Furedi-

Turning children into Orwellian eco-spies

Frank Furedi recalls being educated through fear in Stalinist Hungary, and is disturbed that the same tactics are now used by environmentalists.
----------------------------
If you want to know how it works, watch the official opening video of the Copenhagen summit on climate change (see below). Titled ‘Please Help The World’, the four-minute film opens with happy children laughing and playing on swings. A sudden outburst of rain forces them all to rush for cover. The message is clear: the climate threatens our way of life. It then cuts to a young girl who is anxiously watching one TV news broadcaster after another reporting on impending environmental catastrophes. Then we see the young girl tucked into bed, sweetly asleep as she embraces her toy polar bear… but suddenly we’re drawn into her nightmare. She’s on a parched and eerie landscape; she looks frightened and desolate; suddenly the dry earth cracks and she runs in terror towards the shelter of a distant solitary tree. She drops her toy polar bear in a newly formed chasm and yells and screams as she holds on to the tree for dear life. The video ends with groups of children pleading with us: ‘Please help the world.’ You get the picture.

Although this video is a product of the gathering at Copenhagen, it is typical of the kind of propaganda that is constantly directed at children these days. In a world where moral education seems to be exhausted, where teachers are reluctant to judge or to explain the difference between right and wrong, environmentalism has become one of the few values that educators feel comfortable with. Which is why environmentalism and its values now saturate the school curriculum in Britain and some other countries, too.

In medieval times, religion was central to the teaching of virtually every subject. Students were left in no doubt where the church stood on the smallest details of every topic they were learning about. Today, environmental concerns have been integrated into the curriculum, to the point where they often dominate subjects like geography, science and Personal Health and Social Education and intrude into history and literature, too. The growing significance of environmental issues in the school curriculum is directly proportionate to society’s broader moral illiteracy and loss of purpose. Today, even religious studies often appears as a sub-branch of the dogma of environmental alarmism.
----------------------------------

By transmitting their values to children, the scaremongers hope to channel children’s indignation into hostility towards older generations that are apparently destroying the planet. In the Copenhagen video we hear a child talking about her ‘anger’. When she says ‘I am only a child’, the implication is clear: adults have let children down.

Others go a step further and blame older generations for destroying the environment to such an extent that the survival of future generations is put in jeopardy. The message is that adults are greedy or stupid, or both. This downbeat assessment of adults’ behaviour has mutated into outright hostility towards the moral status of the older generations and their so-called ‘wisdom’. ‘Adults have ruined our world’, says the headline to an article in an online magazine targeting children.

------------------------


In previous times, it was only totalitarian societies that mobilised children to police their parents’ behaviour. It was Orwellian, Big Brother-style states that tried to harness youngsters’ simplistic views of good and evil to reshape the outlook of adults. But who needs Big Brother when the former prime minister of Britain, Tony Blair, can openly assert that ‘on climate change, it is parents who should listen to their children’? It appears that preying on children’s fears and exploiting their anxiety is now considered to be a form of enlightened education. Yet the future of our children demands that we provide them with existential and moral security. Instead of feeding them on a steady diet of scaremongering, we need to inspire them about our potential to improve the future of our world.

Read the whole thing.

As I have pointed out, the media (see my  case-study of the Hindustan Times) are shamefully fully involved in giving children nightmares and turning them against adults.

My 2nd comment at Carbon Footprint

Just left another comment at Carbon Footprint, a Hindustan Times blog by Samar Halarnkar. My previous comment here.

Samar,
as a journalist(and not an activist -I say this because the tenor and content of your 'reporting' is indistinguishable from reports put out by environmental organizations), could you have a look at satellite temperatures and see if you can make out runaway global warming?

The satellite measurements are here-
http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/12/uah-msu-temperatures-for-2009-and.html
with the conclusion-
"A global warming trend continues to be absent despite the very strong El Nino episode that has been affecting the weather for more than half a year and that may match the 1998 El Nino of the century in the near future."

And could you also look into Pachauri's HUGE, way huge, conflicts of interests as reported in today's Daily Telegraph-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6847227/Questions-over-business-deals-of-UN-climate-change-guru-Dr-Rajendra-Pachauri.html

On the one hand,as the chairman of IPCC he has almost godly powers to influence the artificially created carbon markets.On the other, he has his fingers in the carbon pie at umpteen number of funds and organizations.

As the article in the Daily Telegraph put it-
"One subject the talkative Dr Pachauri remains silent on, however, is how much money he is paid for all these important posts, which must run into millions of dollars. Not one of the bodies for which he works publishes his salary or fees, and this notably includes the UN, which refuses to reveal how much we all pay him as one of its most senior officials. "

So much for accountability and transparency.

I know, rich countries are your bugbear but-
could you play the journalist - and not the activist- and investigate Pachauri's affairs?

And I haven't yet asked you to report on climategate- which your newspaper so partisanly dismissed . An event that caused furor in scientific and political circles is not to be dismissed by a newspaper -you know, "news"+paper.Your job is to report-whether you agree on one side of the issue or not.

Your(and your newspaper's) job is to report, not take sides.And even if you do take sides, that cannot be at the expense of blacking out the facts that support the other side. Am I right, Samar?

I hope you will make a start by publishing the incriminating emails.

I write this as a long-suffering reader.

Cheers and regards

Not yet published pending moderation.

Update -
  Not yet published even after about 20 hrs or so. So I have re-submitted it with the following preface-

Samar, you did not publish my comment -it was neither off-topic nor offensive, unless you consider certain opinions not in line with yours as one. So let me in good faith try again-

Update 2-
    Goodie good - now published.

Lessons so simple that even an environmental reporter can savvy

I think our friends in the media, who on this blog are lovingly called 'environmental poodles', can do with some educating - a look at satellite temperatures and other temperature anomalies:

UAH-MSU temperatures for 2009

------------------------
Among these 15 years, 2009 will be cooler than 1998, 2005, 2002, 2007, 2003, and maybe 2006, so it will be just the 6th or 7th warmest year - pretty much exactly in the middle of the last 15 years' scoreboard. A global warming trend continues to be absent despite the very strong El Nino episode that has been affecting the weather for more than half a year and that may match the 1998 El Nino of the century in the near future.

--------------------------
If there were some significant or urgent global warming, you would expect the record to be broken almost every year: that's what increasing functions like to do. However, it's been the 11th year in a row when the record reading wasn't rewritten. And according to UAH, 2009 was 0.25 °C below 1998. Because the 1979-2009 warming trend indicated by UAH is 0.13 °C per decade, we will need roughly 20 more years to return back where we were in 1998, assuming that the warming observed in the last 30 years will continue (it didn't exist between the 1940s and 1970s).

Even if there were a warming issue worth talking about, it doesn't sound terribly urgent given these numbers, does it?

And this is interesting-

As a bonus, I will list you the UAH warming trends (recalculated to temperature changes in °C per century) for various intervals:

1995-2009: +0.95 °C/century
1996-2009: +0.89 °C/century
1997-2009: +0.41 °C/century
1998-2009: -0.24 °C/century
1999-2009: +1.22 °C/century
2000-2009: +0.53 °C/century
2001-2009: -0.78 °C/century
2002-2009: -1.56 °C/century
2003-2009: -1.43 °C/century
2004-2009: -1.43 °C/century
2005-2009: -3.70 °C/century
2006-2009: -2.30 °C/century
2007-2009: -1.00 °C/century
2008-2009: +21.0 °C/century

Of course, the last one must be taken with a big grain of salt. ;-) Otherwise, you can see among these 14 trends, 6 are warming (generously counting the huge 2008-2009 trend as well) while 8 are cooling! ;-) I could be more quantitative but this is roughly what we mean by saying that there has been no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years.

For some reason you won't see this reported in your daily newspaper. I guess, their environmental poodles reporters are too busy copying Greenpeace's press releases into their 'reports'.

An open letter to Damini Purkayastha

An open letter to Damini Purkayastha, who has an utterly clueless article, CITY CRIBS - A GLOBAL WARNING, in the city supplement of the Hindustan Times today.Normally I would not be moved to react, but her photo is cho chweet that I could not help myself but respond.

DAMINI PURKAYASTHA

Cannot find the article online but here is it-

My letter-

Dear Ms. Purkayastha

I was going to write a long rebuttal but what the heck! there are so many things to do and so little time. So, in brief -

1) WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE-
so the warmth you perceive outside your window proves nothing, nada, zilch about global temperatures.If it did, then from the following you would have to conclude that the world is cooling-

In a strange twist, a Washington snowstorm is forcing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, to make an early departure from a global warming summit here in Denmark.

Due to weather complications #Obama leaves #Copenhagen before #cop15 concludes. Oh - the irony

and he (Obama)landed in washington He had raced back to Washington to avoid the worst of a winter storm barreling through the northeastern United States that threatened to dump up to two feet (61 centimeters) of snow on the last weekend of the Christmas holiday shopping season.

All of which, as I said, says nothing about Global temperatures -because WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE


2) DISEASES AND CLIMATE CHANGE-
This article by Paul Reiter, a professor of medical entomology might be instructive-The inconvenient truth about malaria. Summary - environmentalists claim malaria is moving higher up in latitude where it had not been present before due to global warming. Conclusion -wrong!



As Prof.Reiter says-

The disease was present as high as 2,500m above sea level; the mosquitoes were observed at 3,000m. And Nairobi? 1,680m.


These details are not science. They require no study. They are history. But for activists, they are an inconvenient truth, so they ignore them.

3) AH, THOSE HIMALAYAN GLACIERS, the poster boy of global warming, like Kilimanjaro earlier.

Kilimanjaro snow melting due to GW, as claimed by Al Gore,refuted here(Kilimanjaro's shrinking snow not sign of warming -reuters), but does it matter? Environmentalists and their sleeping partners(ideologically speaking) journalists keep parroting the same lies anyway.



Let me not delve into V.K. Raina's inconvenient study of these glaciers that caused Pachauri to have a fit.
A recent Nasa study-

New Study Turns Up the Heat on Soot's Role in Himalayan Warming





A new modeling study from NASA confirms that when tiny air pollution particles we commonly call soot – also known as black carbon – travel along wind currents from densely populated south Asian cities and accumulate over a climate hotspot called the Tibetan Plateau, the result may be anything but inconsequential.

----------------------------
"Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally," said William Lau, head of atmospheric sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Based on the differences it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in this region. There’s a localized phenomenon at play."

Conclusion -climate science is complex.Very complex. What is not known far,far outstrips what is, though Pachauri and Al Gore(both famous climate scientists, I'm sure) may disagree




4) YOUR FILM RECOMMEDATIONS-

 What to say.

35 Inconvenient Truths -The errors in Al Gore’s movie



A judge in Britain's High Court has ruled that Gore's apocalyptic movie on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, should come with a warning that it promotes "partisan political views" and is riddled with errors.

Wish you would inform your readers about it.


For balance (journalists are supposed to maintain balance,right?)you might recommend -

The Great Global Warming Swindle

and Not Evil Just Wrong

No, Damini, my head is not in the sand or in the media bubble in which everything is the fault of America, West, Bush, neo-conservatives and where Obama, Gore, U.N. and Pachauri are gods.But last time I was in the sand I did glimpse a pretty face looking very anxious about the weather outside of it.

Cheers and regards,
gurmeet

Update-
             corrected a couple of spellings

Half-full or half-empty?

The Guardian-

(via Watts up with that)


The Hindustan Times (today, Delhi print edition)-

My comment at Carbon Footprint

Just left a comment at Carbon Footprint, a Hindustan Times blog by Samar Halarnkar-

It seems you missed Ian Fry,the lead negotiator for Tuvalu, who is quite a theatrical persona.From another newspaper -

""I woke up this morning crying, and that's not easy for a grown man to admit," Mr Fry said on Saturday, as his eyes welled with tears.

"The fate of my country rests in your hands," he concluded, as the audience exploded with wild applause.

But the part-time PhD scholar at the Australian National University actually resides in Queanbeyan, NSW, where he's not likely to be troubled by rising sea levels because the closest beach at Batemans Bay is a two-hour, 144km drive away. Asked whether he had ever lived in Tuvalu, his wife told The Australian last night she would "rather not comment".


A career environmentalist who once worked as a Greenpeace political liaison officer, Mr Fry has found his niche in global climate change talks over the past 10 years, representing small Pacific nations and running the climate negotiations for the Association of Small Island States."

There's a lot of fakery going on at Copenhagen that the HT and yourself are blind to.Willingly blind, in my opinion.

How would you describe a gathering where thugs like Chavez, murderers like Mugabe, Ahmadinejad,Sudanese presidential assistant Nafi Ali Nafi (from one of the world's most blood-soaked regimes) are applauded and wined and dined with nary a pip-squeak out of the thousands screaming for 'justice'? You describe it in glowing terms. I say it is the gathering of wolves looking to kill capitalism in one, large blow.

By the way Samar, I had earlier written something about you on my blog that you might be interested in-
http://libertynewscentral.blogspot.com/2009/11/exposing-environmentalists-bitches_27.html


Cheers and regards

Not yet published pending moderation.

Update -
      now published

The Hockey Stick vs. Ice Core Data-putting global temperatures in a historical context

A must watch video -putting into historical context the allegedly unprecedented current warming.Pass it on to those who want to shut down the Western economies (a long held ambition of lefties long before there was any man-made panic at the allegedly man-made global warming).


Video-The Hockey Stick vs. Ice Core Data-putting temperatures in a historical context

More stick for Pachauri

This time from Megan McArdle.
Reuters interviews R.K.Pachauri and gives her a WTF moment-

this interview with the head of the UN's climate experts is ridiculous. He responds to concerns about the peer review process being stacked by saying . . . all the work was peer reviewed. I am open to being convinced that I should not care about hacked information, and I am a confirmed believer in AGW. So why can't, or won't, the climate change community mount a more compelling defense?

And the impression we got from his media chamchas(sycophants) was that this was a great mind. Ha!

Climategate: Bloggers vs MSM

Mark Steyn prefers to call it 'warmergate', which I think is quite appropriate as the data-manipulation by the top climate 'scientists' (after what they have done, they deserve the scare quotes)was to create the illusion of an ever warming world.

He explains the tragic gulf that has opened between the traditional and the new media-

Michael Gerson has lousy timing. In The Washington Post, in one of those now familiar elegies for old media, he writes:

And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don't produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting. The old-media dinosaurs remain the basis for the entire media food chain.

That's laughably untrue in the Warmergate story. If you rely on the lavishly remunerated "climate correspondents" of the big newspapers and networks, you'll know nothing about the Climate Research Unit scandals - just the business-as-usual drivel about Boston being underwater by 2011. Indeed, even when a prominent media warm-monger addresses the issue, the newspaper prefers to reprint a month-old column predating the scandal. If you follow online analysis from obscure websites on the fringes of the map, you'll know what's going on. If you go to the convenience store and buy today's newspaper, you won't. That's the problem.

If anyone needs newspapers, it ought to be for stories like this. If there were no impending epocalypse(sic -apocalypse?), then "climate science" would be a relatively obscure field, as it was up to a generation ago. Now it produces celebrity scientists living high off the hog of billions in grants. They thus have a vested interest in maintaining the planet's-gonna-fry line. So what do the media do? Instead of exposing the thesis to rigorous journalistic examination, they stage fluffy green stunts, run soft-focus "living green" features with Hollywood "activists", and at a time of massive staff cutbacks in every other department create the positions of specialist "climate correspondent" and "environmental reporter" and fill them with sycophantic promoters of the Big Scare to the point that, as Dr Mann coos approvingly to The New York Times, "you've taken the words out of my mouth".

What Gerson writes ought to be true. Warmergate demonstrates why it isn't.

Quite so.
(emphasis mine)

Heads at the Hindustan Times go deeper into sand

It is now day 7 and the Hindustan Times still refuses to report on the Climategate scandal. Those heads in sand are going deeper.

I have sent a second email to the concerned addresses at the HT(no response to the first sent yesterday).The email is as follows-

Dear gentlemen(and ladies) of the press,


it is now 7 days after the exposure of Climategate and you still have not reported on it. Not one word. Not even a whitewash.

I don't think silence is a good option - nor is pretending that nothing happened.
Don't you think the readers of the Hindustan Times deserve to be informed of something so significant?
When can we expect some straight reporting -not spin -on the subject?


cheers and regards,
gurmeet

http://libertynewscentral.blogspot.com/

It was sent to-
chetan@hindustantimes.com,
htreporters@hindustantimes.com,
anika.gupta@hindustantimes.com,
letters@hindustantimes.com


Will publish any response if received.

Let's see if they continue to be dishonestly silent or if they can be shamed into doing the right thing -reporting facts in an unbiased manner.


Update-
Andrew Bolt could very well be speaking of the Indian media as he castigates the Australian one-

The mainstream media - with a handful of (conservative) exceptions - do not know what terrible damage they are doing to their credibility by ignoring or drastically downplaying the Climategate scandal. The story is out, a couple of million times over, on the Internet.

What do you think the people reading of this scandal there conclude when they then turn to, say, The Age or the ABC, and find there barely a word of coverage?

I’ll tell you: they’ll conclude that the media cannot be trusted to tell even the news, let alone the truth, when it conflicts with their agenda.

Exposing environmentalist's bitches -The Hindustan Times, part 2

Part 1 of this post below.

The amazing story of Climategate broke 7 days ago. Indian media has been carefully avoiding it, just as if it were cow shit strewn on the road. I call these media whores environmentalist's bitches.Among the bitchiest is the Hindustan Times.The following is what it has 'reported' on climate change and related issues in the last 6 issues after the exposure of the climate scandal, starting from the 22nd of November(the story was too late to be included in the 21st's issue). These are from the Delhi print edition, not all of them available online-
(this is a really long post out of necessity, I apologize)
(if you want a quick summary -just scroll to the last)

22nd November

1) Page 1
             A story on 'green Tihar jail', conserving energy, bio-mass,solar,yada,yada,yada -surprisingly, the reporter manages avoiding any mention of global warming.



2) Page 11
            Inderjit Hazra attempts a humorous take on global warming-

Exactly a fortnight away from the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, the organisers have banned conference ‘gift bags’ and bottled water to conserve energy. But apart from a few who will be cycling, para-gliding, walking and crawling to Copenhagen, most of the 14,000-odd delegates, media, industry lobbyists and environmental activists descending on the Danish capital will be transported into the city by airborn e vehicles that burn a lot of jet fuel. Apart from the hot air to be generated, that’s a lot of carbon emissions for one event. I implore the powers-that-be (including the forest deity of the Sunderbans, Bon Bibi) to submerge Copenhagen by a freak tsunami. And what is the reason for hosting this catastrophe-triggering summit? Yes, global warming.

This is something many have pointed out again and again -that Global Warming is a religion of sinners. In fact, some really big sinners.We must reduce our carbon footprint drastically or else -except the saints of this religion who are exempt.Rajendra Kumar Pachauri will jet set all over the world endlessly even if his emissions(carbon emissions, that is) are killing the planet. Al Gore will live in a energy-gobbling huge mansion and flit about in private jets to give speeches on environment. UN will organize huge jamborees in top hotels at beautiful locations -the carbon footprint of which could exceed emissions of some countries.

As Andrew Bolt put it-

No one is gassier than a global warming alarmist

But hey, sinning  for a good cause is just fine.

This issue has never been raised in the Hindustan Times,AFAIK. Just as only a court jester could say inconvenient truths about the king and escape execution, so it is only in jest that a writer in Hindustan Times can take potshots at the climate scare industry.Because it is understood -it's all tongue-in-cheek, it's a joke, not to be taken seriously, nod-nod-wink-wink...

Hazra continues-

After a suggestion by the wise and wisecracking Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, beef-eating will stop in the West so as to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, a-fifth of which comes from meat production. As a result, rich westerners will move to a corn-based diet triggering a global food crisis that will wipe out poor people.

Is this an allusion to the food crisis that many said was caused by the idiotic policy of diverting farmland to produce bio-fuels instead of food? Those idiotic policies had been advocated by environmentalists for years.If you read the Hindustan Times then that fact might not have reached you.They don't like to cast greenies as meanies.They were too busy blaming and snickering at George W.Bush.

Again Hazra gets away because he is the court jester.

 Nothing this day on Climategate -maybe the HT is getting its facts right before reporting the story -although that never has stopped the media from headlining something sensational.

23rd November

1) Page 2
             A lament that not many people buy and drive electric cars in Delhi (cannot find this article online)-

We might take the HT more seriously when all the large luxury sedans parked in its office's parking lot are replaced by tiny joint-pain inducing Revas.




2) Page 10
          Environmentalist Darryl D'Monte gets the prime op-ed space to assault the very inconvenient study of the Himalayan glaciers by V.K. Raina, a former Deputy Director General of the Geological Survey of India, that says that "it was premature to make a statement that the glaciers were retreating abnormally because of global warming".

The study by V.K. Raina, a former Deputy Director General of the Geological Survey of India, has apparently not been peer-reviewed. No less a person than R.K. Pachauri, who chairs the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has rubbished the report as “totally unsubstantiated scientific opinion”.

 That the study apparently has not been peer-reviewed should interest the HT in more ways than one.Along with fudging and cherry-picking of data, the tight control of the peer-review process is the heart of Climategate.As Robert Tracinski says-

If it is corrupted, peer review can be a mechanism for an entrenched establishment to exclude legitimate challenges by simply refusing to give critics a hearing.
And that is precisely what we find.
In response to an article challenging global warming that was published in the journal Climate Research, CRU head Phil Jones complains that the journal needs to "rid themselves of this troublesome editor"-hopefully not through the same means used by Henry II's knights. Michael Mann replies:

I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.

Note the circular logic employed here. Skepticism about global warming is wrong because it is not supported by scientific articles in "legitimate peer-reviewed journals." But if a journal actually publishes such an article, then it is by definition not "legitimate."

Also interesting is that D'Monte resorts to argument by authority - the great maharaja-dhiraj* "R.K. Pachauri, .............. has rubbished the report." It's like Moses himself pronouncing the word of God!

So R.K. Pachauri must be a top-notch climate scientist -right?
Wrong!! He studied Industrial Engineering and Economics.

But don't worry - he can rubbish any report he doesn't like - he's the chairman of IPCC. And that is as close to God as it comes nowadays(after Obama, that is).


Just to note-
Activists of extreme left  -from greenies to marxists- regularly get large space in the HT. I have never seen a libertarian getting major space in this paper - it might have happened, but must have been a blink-and-miss-it moment.



 3) Page 13
             A moronic piece on turning veg to save the planet by Bharati Chaturvedi - I have read her for years (just don't ask why) and not once has she risen above parroting greenie talking points in an dull, schoolmarmish manner.


Still nothing on Climategate. Maybe the HT is working on it.Maybe.





24th November


Still nothing on Climategate!
At this point the climate scandal has become huge around the world -there are demands for investigations, there are chances of  U.S. congressional hearings, a flurry of articles from all sides all over.Accusations and calumny are flying thick and fast. But the Hindustan Times sleeps on the job -press, they say, is the watchdog of democracy. This dog lies and sleeps among the thieves.

But it gets worse!

One of the worst things about the Global Warming scare is the traumatization of young minds -whole countries will drown,  giant walls of water will engulf skyscrapers, millions will die in famine, floods,droughts, hurricanes, desertification(all of them at the same time  -somehow they left out the locusts) - all this cannot but leave deep psychological scars on kids.This is psychological terrorism practiced on children!

This is one of the worst forms of child abuse.

 Brendan O’Neill in the article Panic, little ones, it's the Carbon Monster-

In 2007, a survey of 1150 seven to 11-year-olds in Britain found that more than half had lost sleep as a result of worrying about climate change. The children were most likely to be kept awake thinking about “the possible submergence of entire countries” and the “welfare of animals"…

And the Hindustan Times is fully complicit in it -not only by publishing screaming headlines in super-large font about the end of the world. Not just by shutting out reports and research and views that contradict the narrative.

It is now sending out its top honchos to schools to propagandize on Global Warming! This is criminal!

1) Page 4

India must show responsible leadership and go out of its way to act as a pioneer in the fight against climate change since it has begun to affect our lives directly.
This is the agreement a group of 25 Sanskriti School students belonging to Classes 8 to 12 arrived at during a discussion on climate change held in the school on Monday.

Hindustan Times managing editor Samar Halarnkar interacted with the students and discussed various ways and means — such as recycling and reusing — to reduce the climate change impact.

And the Hindustan Times is furiously peddling its narrative -

Halarnkar also discussed on the official stand India must take in the Copenhagen Summit to be held in December in Denmark.

Wow!No wonder this newspaper cannot be honest about climate change.It's not news but activism that clouds their minds -saving the world is so much better that just the facts, thank you ma'am.

And just for laughs-

“The discussion was very informative and it opened our minds to many things related to climate change which we were unaware of,” Aishwarya Shekhar, a Class 11 student, said.

In today's Orwellian times, group-think is debate, all agreeing with each other is 'opening our minds'. But Samar Halarnkar wouldn't know much about open minds anyway.He is an HT man.


Now for one of those regular end-of-world-is-approaching-faster-than-we-thought-so-give-us your-trillions-now! screamers-


2) Page 19

Scream of the day is -

Antartic ice loss vaster,faster than we thought

So is this study peer-reviewed? Darryl D'Monte wouldn't trust it, if not. The HT doesn't tell us. It also doesn't tell us that-

The latest data uses observations taken monthly between 2002 and 2009 from a pair of satellites flying in formation measuring gravity perturbations. Analysing data from the GRACE satellites is tricky and relating them to ice sheet mass estimates involves several steps and assumptions.
--------------------------------
The importance of this research is that it highlights the close scrutiny needed of the region, especially for the East Antarctic ice cap, to see if its rate of loss increases. At present it is not known if the loss is due to climate change or if such losses are in any way exceptional or cyclical. If the changes persist, and accelerate, then, “Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise”, the researchers write.

Others have expressed surprise at the results. A study in 2005 suggested that the East Antarctic ice sheet was actually gaining mass. What this latest work indicates is the need for more observations, an appreciation of the large uncertainties in individual measurements and the problem of relating them to each other. Overall it would be unwise to draw strong conclusions from this research.

Try telling that to the editors of HT!

Just curious - did that 2005 study about increasing Antarctic ice get screaming headlines?Small headlines?Really small headlines?Any headline at all? I didn't think so.We all know why -doesn't fit the narrative.

The HT also didn't tell us that(from the above link)-

East Antarctica, the researchers(of this study) say, is losing mass at about 57 +/-  52 GT/yr (note large uncertainty - it could be consistent with zero ice loss)

This is like saying my mother is 57 years old +/-  52, that is she could be 109 or she could be just 5, who knows but trust me I do!

Such 'research' is enough to get environmental 'reporters' howling away in their headlines.
They and their editors want to make an impact, save the world - no doubts will be admitted.To them, all 'studies' support the narrative. Those that don't, don't exist.(That's Kafkaesque)






25th November

No sign of Climategate in the HT. There is no doubt now. They are not reporting what they do not want to report.


1) Page 15
Environmental poodle Chetan Chauhan carries on the assault on V.K.Raina's study, this time in form of a 'report', not an opinion column.In our media, news and views mix freely.So who is saying that V.K.Raina is wrong?  -a  joint team of WWF-India and Birla Institute of Technology.

I suspect WWF have something to do with environmentalism and so have an agenda.But you wouldn't know it from the 'report'.


Mercifully that is all of climate change for this day.






26th November


I don't expect the Hindustan Times to honestly report on Climategate -but I thought they would do either a small side-column one paragraph whitewash or a little longer one minimizing the whole thing. But there is dead silence.The HT wants to pretend that Climategate didn't happen.Heads in sand. Will blow over,no publicity to the skeptics, storm in a tea-cup .....I can imagine what goes for thoughts in those crusading heads.

Meanwhile, business as usual continues-

1) Page 14
          Top HT honcho Samar Halarnkar continues his brainwashing of school kids, this time at the Tagore International School(cannot find this article online) -

I feel sorry for these children -so sincere, so full of passion to do the right thing.....and so brainwashed. They are unaware that they have become foot-soldiers in the war of Greenies against freedom and capitalism.



2) Page 17
            A small item (again cannot find this online) that tells us the solutions to climate change are good for India -we will get money!Lots of it! Other people's money! All free!
Hey, that's what we all dream of, no?

27th November


Still nothing on Climategate. Keep those heads in sand, guys, and have a nice time in there.But the fire is spreading. I expect a white-washing piece any day now.Even Moses R.K. Pachauri has issued a white-wash of a statement -all is well, nothing to see, move along.

Business as usual continues(this now has the quality of the band playing on a sinking Titanic)-

1) Page1, top news 
               The climate change is the main news -but not, as one would expect from objective journalists, about  Climategate.

Ramesh will meet Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao on Friday, a day after Beijing announced a “voluntary” and “binding” national goal of a 40-45 per cent cut in carbon intensity below 2005 levels by 2020. Carbon intensity is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of economic growth or GDP.

“China has given a wake-up call to us,” Ramesh told Hindustan Times
--------------------------------------------


“Biggest step forward,” said R.K. Pachauri, head of the UN’s panel on climate change. “Now rich countries should declare a financial commitment for saving the planet so that we can have a treaty at Copenhagen.”

Sounds impressive, no? A really serious commitment to cut emissions? Something substantial? That's the impression the writers(among them Chetan Chauhan again) seem to want to leave.

But- as with much about global warming 'reporting' -it's more smokes and mirrors.
After several such paras , the most revealing part is kept for towards the last part of the piece-

China’s new goal does not mean its emissions will reduce. With the new carbon-intensity cuts, Chinese emissions will keep growing with the economy, and faster than India, till 2020 or 2030 when emissions are expected to peak. Chinese officials have avoided announcing a year when emissions will peak before they start to decline.

So no effect on climate change(except the one of keep increasing it). So all that praise is for.....for what exactly? intentions?chanting the right mantra? Actually it's more devious than that. Planet Gore has the goods.



2)  Page 7
             Samar Halarnkar, Managing Editor, Hindustan Times , continues his whirlwind crusade through schools.This time hurricane Halarnkar hits Amity International School, Saket.I'm sure he had an open debate discussing all points of views.(Heh,heh, just kidding)

There are some sad stories of lost childhood due to global warming scaremongering - though I'm sure the HT does not see it that way-

As a school project, a group of students has meticulously calculated the carbon footprint of each student, faculty member as well as that of the whole school -- all in a pioneering environmental endeavor, now on display as a neat and structured report.

I remember, as kids we had much more fun.


3) Page 13
          Uh-oh.
               Here comes that full page scaremongering again. They love doing this.

This includes a softie interview with Dr.R.K. Pachauri in the style of a school master instructing a pupil.(No, the interviewer is not the schoolmaster).
No question of asking some real.....questions.About Climategate, for instance.About "hiding the decline".About a corrupt peer-review process. About why the earth hasn't warmed in the 21st century.About the quality of code. About the quality of surface station data. About the rise of CO2 historically following the temperature and not the other way round. About lucrative incentives to scaremonger -lots of free money.No way. That won't happen.

 Maybe the answers are so obvious to the HT that they assume that everyone knows. Maybe that is why they won't tell us -or ask questions.

Mr. Chetan Chauhan (yes, him again!), could you consider us all as all-out, full-scale, no-good ignoramuses and next time get us some answers? Of course, Mr. Pachauri may never speak to you again but.....or is it all about protecting the narrative?






 Whew, finished! This concludes my review of HT's marvelously biased coverage of climate change.And possibly the longest post on the LNC.

To summarize-

In 6 days-

1) 19 articles on climate change (including 1 related and 1 a satire)(note -there are multiple articles on pg19,on the 24th Nov and on page 13 on the 27th Nov)

2) 18 of them are scaremongering, follow the narrative,crusading to save the planet kind

3) no mention of Climategate -anywhere

4) No clue that not everyone believes the narrative -that there are thousands of scientists who are 'sceptics'

5) no questioning of the climate orthodoxy as represented by the IPCC.


No wonder, the Hindustan Times makes a splendid environmentalist's bitch.




*The colorful Indian language translator -

             maharaja-dhiraaj - king of kings


Update-
      4 ''it's" changed to "its" on the cue of the keen eyed Samar Halarnkar in the comments. Thanks, Samar.

Exposing environmentalist's bitches -The Hindustan Times, part 1

 Note - the meat of this post, the juicy bit, part 2, is here

This will be a series exposing the persistent lack of honest reporting on climate change in the Indian media.Starting with the Hindustan Times because this is the rag I'm most familiar with.

Climategate broke 5(I think) days ago -and for 5(I think) days I have searched the newspaper's site using keywords like - CRU... email... hack....Phil Jones..... And still-

nothing, zilch, nada!

Makes you wonder -

1)do they live in a cave with no internet connection?
2)have they not heard of Climategate( or Climaquiddick as some prefer it)?
3)if so do they not consider it newsworthy?

So the shocking story which(in Andrew Bolt's words)-

* caused an international controversy

* shocked world leaders in climate science

* triggered calls for an inquiry by a former British Chancellor of the Exchequer

* caused fellow Leftist and warmist crusader George Monbiot to call for the resignation of one of the warmist scientists, and complain that fellow Leftists who ignore it are in denial.

* helped to prompt a Liberal revolt against Malcolm Turnbull

* caused warmist crusader Tim Flannery to confess on ABC television for the first time that the world had indeed been cooling, and ”when the computer modelling and the real world data disagrees you have a problem” and “we have to understand why the cooling is occurring, because the current modelling doesn’t reflect it”.

* revealed that one of the co-authors of the IPCC report that Faine(another environmentalist's bitch -ed) cites as gospel conceded ”we can’t account for the lack of warming, it’s a travesty that we can’t”.

is not worthy of being covered?

Or, as is more likely -doesn't fit the narrative.

This, in these last 5 days, has been the Hindustan Time's agenda(as it has been for past several years -they don't take their eyes off the ball)-


UH-OH! This is going to be long post.....a mere five days and so much warmingering......so will continue in the next post.


Update -

Climategate broke seven days ago -making media's silence all the more damning.So I will cover last 6  issues of the Hindustan Times in the next post.



Update 2 -

Part 2 of this post is now online.

Greens and the MSM -pimp and the bitch

I have great respect for prostitutes -those who are in it voluntarily. They earn an honest living. One can't say that of the mainstream media(MSM). They give whoring a bad name. The way they have become mere megaphones of the environmentalists, their bootlickers, their...bitches -is simply astounding. It is a journalistic fraud of the highest order -if they were oil or financial company executives, most newspaper editors would be behind bars. They make up facts, they hide inconvenient truths, they delight in scare-mongering,they put up dodgy reports in screaming headlines, the way they carry the trumpet for the capitalism-hating, ideologically obsessed big-government greenies ......They make good bitches.

Remember acid rain?
From Planet Gore-

As with the Truth about Acid Rain, the MSM Wants to Bury Climaquiddick [Henry Payne]

David Skole, a professor of forestry at Michigan State University, visited the Detroit News offices earlier this month to argue that cap-and-trade legislation would be an economic boon to America. As evidence, he sited the 1990 Clean Air Act, which initiated a cap and trade program for power plant–particulate emissions. “Everyone said it would be too costly,” Skole gleefully announced, “but they were wrong and it worked.”

In fact, like global warming science today, the “consensus” science in 1990 — which argued that Midwest power plants were destroying Northeast lakes with acid rain — was bunk. So how can Skole (and his allies) boldly stake their claim? Because Washington politicians and their media parrots covered up the scientific evidence in 1990 so that it would not derail the regulation they had long sought. It is a cautionary tale for those who think that truth will win the day after the newly released Climate Research Unit e-mails — a.k.a., Climaquiddick — have revealed fraud in global-warming science.

The NAPAP (National Acid Rain Precipitation Assessment Project) study published in 1989 — which took ten years and cost $500 million, the most comprehensive federal study ever undertaken — proved that acid rain was a minor nuisance and that passing expensive regulation would do little to address the supposed problem.

I briefly covered the story in Washington at the time having read alternative media reports in the Washington Times by Warren Brookes and Reason magazine. But, as in Climaquiddick today, the MSM buried the story’s tawdry details. In 1989, I spoke with two journalists who knew of the report’s conclusions, but who refused to report on it lest it jeopardize passage of the Clean Air Act. I interviewed then-EPA Chief Bill Reilly (a green Bush appointee) who dismissed the report. Congress, despite having spent half-a-billion, quashed the inconvenient science. Only one brief hearing was held.

Months after the regulations were voted into law, 60 Minutes became the first MSM outlet to look into the allegations that acid rain science was a hoax.

“(NAPAP chief scientist Ed) Krug and then-NAPAP director James Mahoney explained and defended the project’s conclusions,” reported Reason. “Both argued that acid rain is not a crisis. On acid lakes, (60 Minutes reporter) Kroft repeated NAPAP’s belief that acid rain contributes to acidity of only ‘about 2 percent of the surface water in the Adirondacks.’”

Asked about a New York Times story that claimed acid rain had turned forests in Appalachia into “ragged landscapes of dead and dying trees,” Krug told 60 Minutes, “I don’t know where they got that from. It appears to be another assertion, unsubstantiated.”

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz also got wind of the NAPAP cover-up after the fact. Trying to explain why environmental reporters had ignored the scientific evidence that would have precluded $4 billion a year in regulatory compliance, he wrote: “Some reporters say privately that it is difficult to write stories that debunk the conventional wisdom of environmental activists, whom the press treats more deferentially than industry spokesmen and other lobbyists.”

Fortunately, the alternative press has grown since 1989 and today there are prominent news outlets like Fox and the blogosphere to help report the inconvenient Climaquiddick facts.

But as with acid rain, the MSM continues to filter out information that does not fit the Big Government green agenda. So that when MSU professor Skole spun his false tale of the Clean Air Act’s “success” before a group of journalists, he could assume ignorance of the science.

Just to emphasize-

I spoke with two journalists who knew of the report’s conclusions, but who refused to report on it lest it jeopardize passage of the Clean Air Act

They are not reporters -they are activists.They are agenda-driven whores.
Environmentalist's bitches.

(emphasis mine)