Also see:
2002-Current Issue
Pre-2002 Back Issues
Article Archive
Journalists' Library

Senate Environment Chair Inhofe and Aide
Take on AP/Borenstein, Brokaw, Revkin

By Bud Ward

The continuing political attacks on climate change science have taken a new and, some felt, menacing track in Washington with the Republican chair of the Senate's key environmental committee alleging bias on the part of three of the nation's leading news organizations and three specific reporters.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe of Oklahoma was assisted in his criticism of prominent climate reporting by a new and assertive staff aide, a former producer for conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh.

Inhofe, a staunch critic of what he calls the global warming "hoax," first put out a Committee majority press release blasting the Associated Press and its well regarded science reporter Seth Borenstein for bias and faulty methodology. The Republican committee members' press release panned a June 27 AP piece reporting climate scientists' generally favorable reviews of the science as presented in former Vice President Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." AP rejected the senators' criticisms outright, and several journalists and academics rallied to AP's and Borenstein's defense.

The Inhofe/Republican majority members' release said Borenstein and AP "chose to ignore the scores of scientists who have harshly criticized" Gore's presentation of climate science. "In the interest of full disclosure, the AP should release the names of the 'more than 100 top climate researchers' they attempted to contact to review" the movie, and also the names "of the so-called 'skeptics' they claim to have contacted."

Misspelling his name, the Inhofe press release criticized Robert Corell (one r), chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment group, for, among other things, "his reported sponsorship by the left-leaning Packard Foundation."

As a source, in what inevitably struck some as a strange irony, Inhofe's press release pointed to the junkscience.com website as one of its references.

The release dismissed the famous "hockey stick" graph prominent in the Gore movie as being "now-discredited," and it rendered a tortuous interpretation of a recent National Academy of Sciences report on that issue. Others, including the Academy's own release, interpret the Academy study as generally re-enforcing the hockey stick research headed by Penn State University's Michael Mann.

Getting somewhat personal, the Inhofe release quoted a little known scientist at James Cook University, Australia, as having told the Canadian Free Press, in reference to Gore, that "the man is an embarrassment to U.S. science and its many fine practitioners."

As unusual as it was for a Senate Environment Committee chairman to take on a prominent news organization and reporter by name, Inhofe apparently was just gearing up.

On July 11, he put out a release alleging a "lack of objectivity and balance" in former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw's July 16 Discovery Channel piece "Global Warming: What You Need to Know." The release this time said Brokaw's "partisan past and his reliance on scientists who openly endorsed Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 and who are financially affiliated with left-wing environmental groups" led to a broadcast "devoid of balance and objectivity."

That's about what the public should expect of Brokaw, Inhofe continued, since he "has been affiliated with the Sierra Club," had recently praised Gore's movie as "stylish and compelling," and had called the science behind anthropogenic warming "irrefutable." The Inhofe release mentioned that "Brokaw's wife also serves as vice chairman of the board of directors of the environmental group Conservation International," leaving to readers to interpret the implications of that affiliation.

"Brokaw presents NASA's James Hansen as an authority on climate change ... without revealing to viewers the extensive political and financial ties that Hansen has to Democratic Party partisans," the Inhofe release alleged. It also said Hansen received a quarter-million-dollar grant from a foundation headed by John Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.

The Inhofe release also dismissed Princeton University scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who appeared extensively on camera in the Brokaw documentary, of "partisan and ideological affiliations," such as his serving as a science advisor to Environmental Defense, for which he long had worked as a full-time scientist employee. The release used quotations from now-retired Colorado University climatologist Roger Pielke, Sr., to buttress its claims against Brokaw's two-hour documentary, produced jointly by the Discovery Channel, BBC, and NBC News.

A few days later, Inhofe communications director Marc Morano, in the mid-90s a producer for conservative radio commentator Limbaugh's television show, told the online newsletter Greenwire that "the media has essentially white-washed the whole issue" of climate change. "There has been a love fest in the media on this," he added.

Press release writer Morano's next target: The New York Times' Andrew C. Revkin, whose new book on global warming and the North Pole, Morano suggested, can only benefit by Revkin's and the Times' presumably "unbalanced" coverage of climate science.

"The media is 100 percent on the other side," Morano told Greenwire reporter Darren Samuelsohn.

AP: Story 'Completely Accurate' ... Revkin: Book 'Spin-Free'

The AP, responding in kind by press release, was having none of it, and neither was Revkin, who put out a response over his own name.

"AP's methodology was simple, straightforward, and clean," AP Director of Media Relations and Public Affairs Linda Wagner said in a statement. She said Borenstein had contacted more than 100 of the nation's top scientists, "including those who have been vocal skeptics of climate change theory." She said the news service then quoted only those scientists who said they had seen the Gore movie or had read his recently published book of the same title. "Most scientists have not seen the movie or read the book, and those who had seen it or read it were generally positive toward Gore's scientific presentation," she said.

Wagner described the Borenstein story as "completely accurate" and said it "met AP's high standards in every way. The story reported facts. It did not take a position in a debate, whether political or scientific, about global warming." (Just as the initial Inhofe/Morano press release contained a misspelling of Corell's name, the AP response had its own problems: It referred to Gore's film as "The Inconvenient Truth," rather than "An Inconvenient Truth." One hopes that the wire service's "completely accurate" and "high standards" references apply more to Borenstein's reporting than to AP's own release defending it.)

Reacting to Morano's comments in the Greenwire story, Revkin described his book, "The North Pole Was Here," as being "as spin-free and scare free" as anything written on the subject – "an extension of the journalism I've been doing on climate for 20 years, journalism that has been consistently lauded by people on all sides of the climate debate for its accuracy and fairness."

Because selling newspapers in the U.S. is "implicitly commercial," Revkin mused whether "they" might instead prefer "state-controlled 'neutral' coverage of this important issue or fair and accurate free-market coverage."