Who’s The Real Serial Exaggerator?
Mar 21st, 2007 at 11:33 am by Susie
Why, that would be the New York Times, the place that nurtured Judy Miller!
Trust me. If the right wing and their media enablers weren’t so afraid of Al Gore, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to destroy him:
Scheduled for March 21, former Vice President Al Gore’s high-profile congressional testimony on the pressing dangers of global warming will likely surpass the March 16 media spectacle that accompanied Valerie Plame’s appearance in the House. Wednesday will both mark Gore’s first official visit to Capitol Hill since leaving the Clinton administration and offer a sneak peak at the global warming policies his administration would have likely implemented had the Supreme Court not ordered Florida officials to stop counting the votes back in December 2000.
Gore’s right-wing critics, anxious to fuel a backlash against Gore and his award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, are using his congressional appearance to raise doubts about his global warming crusade. The Republican noise machine is already trying to gin up excitement about a possible global warming showdown, although some of its talking points seem a bit thin. (A Drudge Report “exclusive” this week hyped the fact that following his Senate testimony, Gore might be asked questions by the assembled legislators.)
Busy orchestrating their attacks, Gore’s political foes received a gift last week from The New York Times in the form of a front-page Science section article alleging that scientists were raising concerns about Gore’s global warming facts. Dredging up the media’s 2000 campaign meme about Gore being loose with the truth, the Times resurrected the premise that Gore’s an exaggerator who cannot be trusted.
The misleading hit piece was a godsend for Republican partisans. CNN right-wing talker and global warming skeptic Glenn Beck was euphoric the day of the Times report. “Al Gore is finally being slammed in the face for his distortion of science and the facts, and it’s being done by The New York Times,” Beck told his CNN Headline News viewers. “Some days it just doesn’t get any better.” And a Rightpundits.com headline cheered, “New York Times SLAMS Global Warming Zealots.” The post insisted, “We’ve always known that Al Gore is a serial exaggerator. Say, remind me who invented the internet?”
Indeed, it’s hard to overstate just how closely the Times article echoed conservative talking points about global warming (i.e. alarmists are driving the debate) and about Al Gore (his exaggerations cannot be trusted).
Yet for close readers of the Times, last week’s attack came as no surprise. The newspaper’s coverage of Gore for years has dripped with an odd disdain; a completely out-of-context contempt for the former vice president. Note that four days prior to its attempted take-down of An Inconvenient Truth, the Times published an op-ed (subscription required) that ridiculed Gore’s personal “energy lust” and mocked him as a hypocrite because his utility bills for his home in Tennessee were deemed to be excessive.
Bob Somersby has been on this for years, calling it “The War on Gore.”
Honestly, as far as the energy bills are concerned, he could snort crude off the corpses of baby seals for all I care, because the awareness he’s raised about global warming and what individuals can do about it has done enough widespread good to offset any harm one person’s house could possibly do. Hypocrisy may be kinda sucky and counterproductive, but it doesn’t negate the facts. Besides, you wanna look at excess, let’s see how much energy the White House uses. Or perhaps any given office tower in America. Yawn. Next!
Patrick Healy, one of the writers, has a history of partisan hackery.
The New York Times company owns shares in several paper manufacturing firms, which, if they are like other paper mills, are liable to pollute.
Pure speculation on my part.
I listened to the same crap from NPR this morning - Gore the serial exagerator taking the science of global warming beyond the facts. Tomlinson must be proud.
Salmo,
Indeed. That’s why I stopped listening to NPR. I have an excess of a specific vile humor (choler, or yellow bile), and it was getting too riled up every morning by the slanted story framing and Wingnut spinventions that have inundated all NPR news programming.
They’ll never get another dime from me.