The Greens-Government-Media Complex – the new Iron Triangle – was on full display this weekend as the U.N. tried to muster a frightening dossier of intelligence to convince the international community to fight a pre-emptive war on global warming.
The United Nations and Green groups stand to gain enormous political power from the venture as they advocate carbon caps and other global regulations run through the U.N.’s vast bureaucracy. Major media responded in kind with barely concealed government press releases. New York Times’s green reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal (in dispatches that ran across the planet via the Times News Service) committed journalistic malpractice as she uncritically reported on the “forceful language” of the “most powerful” IPCC report warning of “mounting risks.”
The triangle was further reinforced by the Nobel Peace Prize, “an honor,” wrote Rosenthal, “that many scientists here said emboldened them to stand more forcefully behind their positions.” Science? Sounds like raw politics.
Nowhere in the Times’s report (or similar dispatches from AP) was a fact questioned, an inconvenient study cited, or a skeptic quoted.
. . . Except when it came to the Bush Administration’s stance. When the Administration objected that the “final report match the science,” Rosenthal immediately referenced a fellow Bush skeptic to shoot them down, quoting a Greenpeace staffer who “questioned that explanation.”
In the media’s green echo chamber, it seems, dissenting voices must be silenced.