Feeling burned over a cause for concern


Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun Columnist

16 April, 2008

I'VE proved it often: The Age won't tell the full facts on global warming. Now its own reporters admit they were forced to be biased.

What a sad insight into how media salvation-seekers and carpet-baggers are whipping up panic about a warming that actually halted in 1998.

And a warning, too, of what can go wrong when the media adopts global warming as a cause.

In a statement of protest last week, 235 Age journalists confirmed that their coverage of last month's Earth Hour had been, in effect, propaganda.

"Reporters were pressured not to write 'negative' stories and story topics followed a schedule drafted by Earth Hour organisers," they said.

That confession came after the ABC's Media Watch released an embarrassing email sent by the green group WWF to Age editor-in-chief Andrew Jaspan under the creepy header Re: Any last requests?.

In it, WWF staffer Fiona Poletti replied she indeed had more requests, and told Jaspan to run three more puff pieces for Earth Hour, a stunt in which readers were told to help save the planet from global warming by turning off lights for an hour.

Here's one: "We would love the fashion story to get a good run. This has been given to Orietta and is about the fashion industry's unified support for Earth Hour."

WWF ordered, Jaspan obeyed. The Age dutifully ran that story, under the headline: "Fashionistas no dummies when it comes to be switching off."

WWF's request for a second story on businesses backing Earth Hour? Also obeyed. On cities around the world joining in? Obeyed. In each case Jaspan had journalists writing, albeit unwittingly, to a green group's script.

Jaspan has form for pushing a deep green agenda.

He campaigned against the dredging of Port Phillip Bay, told readers to take a cold bath rather than use their gassy air conditioners, and said new roads, which made it easier to drive, should be scrapped to save the planet from global warming.

No wonder he's off this weekend to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's ideas summit, where he'll talk global warming at a session that includes fellow catastrophists Tim Flannery, Tanya Ha, Ross Garnaut, Penny Wong, Ian Lowe and Greg Bourne, the WWF head.

That's how climates of opinion are manipulated, you see.

But, while his staff now want his hide, this shame was not all his own work.

Blame also the journalists who, for their own reasons, have long failed to report both sides of global warming debates - or to protest, until now, at the paper's bias.

Blame The Age's chief executive, Don Churchill, who emailed staff to thank them for "promoting" Earth Hour - when journalists should have merely reported or even critiqued it.

And blame David Kirk, head of the Fairfax group, which owns the paper, who asked reporters to "participate (in) and observe Earth Hour and the hope it expresses for our environmental future".

The joke is most Age journalists are so green they don't need to be pushed to preach this gospel. But their bosses' prodding changes everything.

What a reporter may freely write as news becomes propaganda if he or she is not free to report all the relevant facts. So all Age journalists writing about Earth Hour, or global warming, must for now be considered propagandists.

Too harsh? Then consider: after all that pushing of the green line by Age bosses, which staff writer would dare write that global warming in fact may have stalled, with oceans cooling and the planet not heating since 1998? Indeed, none has.

Which Age staffer would dare write that Earth Hour actually saved so little in greenhouse gases that just eight cars will make good those emissions in a year? Again, none has.

Which would dare point out that all Earth Hour proved, therefore, was that the calls of a Rudd or a Jaspan to cut our emissions by 60 per cent by 2050 are moonshine. Yet again, none has.

I don't write this just to score easy points off a competitor. Wider, more important issues are at stake.

It is always a danger to honest journalism when a newspaper takes up a cause. Suddenly reporters are under pressure to push a line, and not necessarily the full facts.

Most media organisations, my own included, have unfortunately run that risk by jumping on the global warming bandwagon, usually for no better reason than to seem more "relevant".

Pages of print, and hours of airtime, are then spent on preaching fashionable pieties about warming with all the fervour of a Bible Society pamphlet and all the no-warts-please honesty of a used-car ad.

Responsible newspapers at least try to ensure their staff know they are still free to dissent and report inconvenient truths, which is why I'm still here, writing as I do, even after our boss Rupert Murdoch last year said it was time to "give the planet the benefit of the doubt" with global warming.

But can anyone at The Age - or ABC - show that they, too, can buck the company line on global warming?

No, is the answer. And when dissent is absent and so many inconvenient facts unreported, why should readers trust a word of what The Age prints as the "truth" about global warming?

Join Bolt's blog at www.blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt

bolta@heraldsun.com.au