Media Sins Create a Green Saint.(Ian Thomas)(Brief Article)

Last fall, deadpan Luddite Ralph Nader predicted that if he cost Al Gore the presidential election, it would be a blessing in disguise. Since Bush and Gore both were tools of the polluter lobby, Nader argued, Gore was the far more dangerous candidate. In "a choice between a provocateur and an `anesthetizer,' I'd rather have a provocateur," Nader assured his followers. "It would mobilize us."

Not only is the environmental movement mobilized, it's moving like the Wehrmacht on French soil--unopposed and attacking without provocation. And the press is behaving like those helpful French valets who carried German luggage. On issue after issue, the mainstream media have offered, at best, only token skepticism toward a relentless torrent of environmental hooey.

President Bush asked the National Academy of Sciences to present him with a report assessing what we do and do not know about global warming. When the 28-page report was released, reporters eager to maintain their journalistic detachment opted to read, it seemed, only the first paragraph or the press releases.

The NAS report made no bones about the fact that Earth is getting warmer, and confirmed the possibility that human activity contributes to some extent to that warming. But the report also noted that warming may be part of the standard, long-established ebb and flow of the world climate. Beyond these hedged findings, the scientists went into serious on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand mode. Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas and TAE's James Glassman noted in the Weekly Standard that the thin report contained the words "uncertain" or "uncertainty" 43 times.

And yet a CNN reporter mischaracterized the report as "a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." The New York Times matter-of-factly asserted in a news story that the report "concluded that temperatures are rising because of human activities." New York Daily News TV critic Eric Mink wrote, "There's no scientific doubt that the global climate is warming, and there's no scientific doubt that human activity is responsible."

An even more crystalline example of the press exploding into a full dash toward environmental buffoonery is the case of Ian Thomas. Hailed around the globe as, in the words of England's Guardian, "mapmaking's first modern martyr," Ian Thomas was a contract worker droning away in the belly of the United States Geological Survey by day, and an environmentalist true believer ... well, also by day. His official job was to map the migratory patterns of birds on the ...