The Tennessee Center for Policy Research’s bird-dogging of Gore’s energy hypocrisy sheds light on another scandal: The corruption of media environmental coverage.

The Center is a small non-profit in Nashville dedicated to reporting on Tennessee public policy, primarily government spending. In February 2007, staff investigator Trent Seibert uncovered that the Goracle’s home utility bills were 20 times the national average, a bombshell that came just one day after Gore’s Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth.

Drudge picked up the story and it spread like wildfire across the Internet — and it made waves in journalism circles too. How had a tiny think tank scooped the Nashville Tennessean, one of the country’s storied investigative newspapers, on Tennessee’s most prominent public figure?

With egg on his face, Tennessean editor Mark Silverman admitted that his paper had possessed the information for months but not published it. “We got occupied by other stories,” Silverman lamely explained. The paper, in other words, claimed not to think it a priority to report that the world’s most prominent green politician – a Tennessean who had called global warming a “moral threat” and a “planetary emergency” – was, in fact, an energy hog. For perspective, would the paper have put on the backburner a story that, say, another former Tennessee senator – pro-life advocate Fred Thompson — and his wife had aborted a child?

In fact, Silverman is a known Democratic partisan with a reputation for protecting Democratic pols. As news editor for my paper, the Detroit News, before he took the Tennessean job, Silverman consistently ran defense for state Democratic politicians as well as deflecting major stories that countered the party’s environmental and health-care agendas.

The Center’s Seibert (a tough, gumshoe reporter who is hardly a movement conservative) knows this all too well, since he himself worked at the Tennessean before joining the non-profit. When I asked him recently about Silverman’s excuse for not reporting the Gore story, he said matter-of-factly: “They sat on it.”

Further, when the Tennessean finally addressed the story, the paper actually spun it to favor Gore, writing:

A day after a film about his efforts to combat global warming won an Oscar, former Vice President Al Gore was called a hypocrite by a Tennessee group that said his Belle Meade home is consuming too much energy.“As the spokesman of choice for the global warming movement, Al Gore has to be willing to walk (the) walk, not just talk the talk, when it comes to home energy use,” said Drew Johnson, president of (the Center).
Gore’s power bill shows, however, that the former vice president may be doing just that.
Gore purchased 108 blocks of “green power” for each of the past three months, according to a summary of the bills. That’s a total of $432 a month Gore paid extra for solar or other renewable energy sources. The green power Gore purchased in those three months is equivalent to recycling 2.48 million aluminum cans or 286,092 pounds of newspaper.

This kind of environmental bias in America’s media is an epidemic that occurs daily in publications from the Tennessean to the New York Times to CNN. And it is a major reason why Gore (and his movement) is still taken seriously as a policy leader – rather than the discredited, false prophet that he really is.

Like the utility bill story, news of Gore’s profitable investments in green companies that benefit from his crusade has also been ignored by the MSM. And this year — as in 2007 — it’s the Tennessee Center for Public Policy Research that has scooped the news media on important facts concerning Gore’s home energy use.

You will find nothing in the Tennessean.