{"id":8513,"date":"2019-04-19T11:46:19","date_gmt":"2019-04-19T18:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gelbspanfiles.com\/?p=8513"},"modified":"2019-04-19T11:46:19","modified_gmt":"2019-04-19T18:46:19","slug":"and-the-award-for-climate-change-propagandism-goes-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gelbspanfiles.com\/?p=8513","title":{"rendered":"And the Award for Climate Change Propagandism Goes to\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Old-school, hard-nosed, traditional reporters don’t merely accept superficial information without question, they spot inconsistencies in the material and go digging in order to find out why the details don’t line up right. Three weeks ago, The Weather Channel website featured a hit piece<\/a> against the Heartland Institute authored by Pam Wright, which Heartland’s Jim Lakely dissected yesterday here<\/a>. As ever with such dissections, there’s always more. From my own unique bit of expertise on the political side of the global warming issue, let my politely suggest that Pam Wright should not quit her day job as a propagandist to become an old-school reporter.<\/p>\n

In her hit piece, she directly cites Desmogblog four times, a place which suffered from a ‘journalism due diligence’ problem<\/a> ever since its inception. But she also has this line within her piece about a skeptic climate scientist, Dr Sherwood Idso, containing a url link address which technically sources Desmog for a 5th<\/em> time:<\/a><\/p>\n

In July 1991, Idso participated in pro-coal ad campaign<\/a> financed by coal-burning utility companies as one of three members of a \u201cscience advisory panel,\u201d according to the New York Times.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As loyal readers of GelbspanFiles know, there is far more<\/em><\/strong> to that detail. But for new readers arriving here, let me briefly retell the story, using screencapture photo links.<\/p>\n

The 1991 NYT<\/em> article, when anyone takes the time to read it further, contains the allegation that the ‘pro-coal PR campaign’ had the strategy goal to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact<\/em>,” supposedly seen within secret leaked industry documents provided to the newspaper<\/a> by the Sierra Club. Problem is, from right around the present time back to mid 1997, almost nobody credits either one of those entities with the discovery of those alleged memos. Al Gore spelled out that memo phrase full screen in his 2006 movie<\/a>, and his movie companion book said ‘Pulitzer-winning reporter’ Ross Gelbspan discovered it<\/a>. Scores of other people throughout the years credit Gelbspan<\/a> for that, when they aren’t doing a three-step citation cascade<\/a> to cite 1)<\/strong> a Union of Concerned Scientists dossier<\/a>, which in turn cites<\/a> 2)<\/strong> a set of Greenpeace memos<\/a>, which, in turn, 3)<\/strong> originate \u2014 alongside Ross Gelbspan<\/a> \u2014 at a forgotten enviro-activist group called Ozone Action<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For all the times Weather Channel author Pam Wright cites Desmogblog in her piece as some kind of credible source about industry disinformation campaigns, why does she fail to mention Ross Gelbspan? Desmog was, after all, inspired by<\/a> and built on<\/a> the works of Ross Gelbspan; he was its star blogger from January 2006 to November 2010<\/a>. Why, after a little over 20 years of hero worship of Ross Gelbspan as the discoverer of the corruption of skeptic scientists like Dr Sherwood Idso, is he now cast aside?<\/p>\n