Prior to the International Conference on Climate Change in New York last week, Heartland Institute president Joseph Bast observed that, with such a large gathering of climate skeptics meeting in the middle of Gotham, it would be “be hard for journalists and policy makers to ignore us.”
But they did.
Here in Detroit — its core auto industry a primary target of global warming legislation — coverage was nearly completely blacked out by local media.
Despite its industry and swing-state demographic profile, Detroit’s mainstream media is uniformly left of center, and not a single newspaper article, radio, or television report was devoted to the conference. Only Frank Beckmann, a popular conservative AM talk radio host, devoted time to the event.
Nationally, the coverage (and loaded, anti-conference coverage it was) was not much better. A Nexis search of major newspapers finds only four papers covering the event: the New York Times (two by reporter-activist Andrew Revkin), Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, with a fourth paper – the Newark Star-Ledger – reprinting the WaPo story.
Television mention was similar, with most coverage coming from talk hosts like Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson. Of the network news programs, only CNN (with a slam piece by reporter-activist Miles O’Brien) and Fox News (Brit Hume reporting Weather Channel founder John Coleman’s headliner condemning his prodigy’s embrace of the green religion) found the debate over this major public policy issue newsworthy.