|
DOUGHERTY: Gore draws 'friendly fire' for his efforts |
|
|
Sunday, 21 October 2007 |
 The old conservative complaint about the liberal media or liberal press pops up from time to time and it always makes me smile.
It was always funny, hearing conservatives claim that a liberal media ruled the world because certain reporters were liberal. Writing opinion is one thing — that’s what I am supposed to do in this space on this page, labeled as “Opinion.”
But it was always amusing to hear the GOP spinmasters, even before they were called such names, make the complaint about liberal media when almost every newspaper I have ever worked for — liberal as I am — has been run by an equally conservative businessman who wasn’t about to let liberal reporters spew their ridiculous opinions in news stories on news pages.
I am not saying that it never happens in newspapers, but I am contending that it happens so rarely that it is not a major problem, either from the conservative or liberal viewpoint.
But broadcast media seems to be a different matter.
Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the like make sure that the Bush message gets espoused these days. Before that, they kept up the attack on President Clinton and, beginning in 2000, on his proposed successor, Al Gore.
Granted, a few liberal-leaning radio talk shows are out there, and the Air America Radio network seems to be hanging on by its collective fingernails.
But Fox is most prominent in the spin-control practice these days and it continues to do a job on Gore, who has stayed in the news, despite being vacated from the presidency in 2000.
First, he grew a beard and put on some weight — Fox and Limbaugh picked on him for that. Then the former vice president made a documentary about global warming called “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award. Fox and Limbaugh ridiculed him for that.
Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now have been awarded the Nobel Prize, so the minions in the electronic media and columnists who act on behalf of the White House and its oil-industry-based contributors have started an attack on the movie again, citing a news story on a judge’s opinion that purports that a “school official” has successfully fought the movie being shown in Great Britain. He hasn’t. A judge ruled that the movie may be shown to British schoolchildren, but should be accompanied by information noting where Gore’s view is different from IPCC findings.
What it also doesn’t say is that the school official is one man who has received substantial financial backing from a Scottish mining magnate who has for years fought anyone trying to report global warming.
Many of the quotes in the stories about the judge’s ruling, such as calling the nine inconsistencies he found with IPCC findings “errors,” actually came from Stewart Dimmock, the man who filed the suit. The judge never called them errors.
Most reports also did not include the judge’s remarks that the film is “substantially founded upon scientific research and fact.” The judge also said he had “no doubt” that the defendant's expert was “right when he says that: ‘Al Gore’s presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate.’ ”
Hmmm. Wonder how those inaccuracies made it into those reports? Was it anti-global warming bias? Was it pro-business or pro-Bush prejudice? Was it “only” sloppy reporting with no agenda in mind? We know only that it couldn’t be a conservative media.
Mike Dougherty is city editor of the Courier. His column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.
doughertywriter @yahoo.com
|
Razorbacks
