Media and Communications Policy : Media Policy & First Amendment Foundation : The Media Institute : Free Speech, Media Regulation, Content Controls

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Back in the bad old days, “samizdat” was the name given to that body of politically forbidden literature that was clandestinely published and circulated in the Soviet Union.  In 2010, the Internet serves as an American samizdat, to the advantage of conservatives of one shade or another.

The Internet advantages “conservatives” more than “liberals” not because there are more or better conservative websites, but because of (1) the larger numbers of conservatives; and (2) the failure of the legacy media to portray conservative views and concerns.

No issue better illustrates this phenomenon than the extraordinary revelations of fraud and abuse in the “global warming” debate.  Despite the steadily growing number of Internet stories challenging the findings and practices of such as the IPCC and the East Anglia CRU, the mainstream U.S. media (the broadcast networks, newsweeklies, wire services, the Washington Post and New York Times) have shown little or no interest in these stories.

Instead, most of these news outlets continue to print or broadcast reports that are oblivious to the damage done in recent weeks to the claim of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  And even where they have made mention of this development, they’ve often done so in a way that’s calculated to minimize the impact of the exposes.

A good example is the story published in the Washington Post by Julia Eilperin and David Farenthold.  Under the headline “Series of missteps by climate scientists threatens climate-change agenda,” the authors offer a perfunctory rundown of the many allegations that have recently been made against AGW literature, while repeating, mantra-like and in virtually every other paragraph, some variation on the claim of a scientific consensus that “climate change is happening.”

The contrast between this kind of coverage, or non-coverage, by the MSM, and the multitude of critical stories available on the Internet, many of them links to articles published in major British newspapers, is startling.  But news aggregators like the Drudge Report aren’t the only example of the way the Internet is empowering conservative voices re this and other issues.

The online comments sections of the MSM themselves are proving to be fertile soil for conservative opinion.  In fact, one sometimes wonders what the MSM’s reporters make of the comments that follow publication of their pieces online.  As of the time this piece is being written, for instance, the Eilperin/Farenthold story has attracted about 200 comments, perhaps 70 percent of them critical of the reporters for whitewashing, or failing to mention in sufficient detail, the “Climategate” revelations.

Other examples of the ways in which the American samizdat is facilitating right-of-center news and opinion can be seen in the widespread circulation of important stories similarly ignored until late in the news cycle, like the Acorn scandal, and more recently of exposes of the role of public employee unions in the deteriorating financial condition of so many states and municipalities.

There was a time, not so long ago, when news coverage by the MSM could set the agenda, and prosper, whatever its slant.  No more.  The issue today is how much longer the MSM will continue to practice center-left journalism in a center-right country.  At a time when their business models are in disarray, and the economy on its uppers, how long before the MSM come to believe that this is just bad business?

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Perhaps because of their declining prospects, much of the mainstream media are acting very hinky these days.  On the one hand we have the spectacle of such as the Associated Press and Newsweek openly adopting opinion as their journalistic motif.  While on the other we see newspapers, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, awash in the kind of political reporting that reduces even the most important policy issues to the banalities of “horse race” journalism.

This latter development has become all the more insufferable in the current nightmarish environment, where every current and proposed law or regulation should be more carefully analyzed for its effect on the economy than for its impact on politicians and political parties.

Coverage of the health care debate has been singularly inadequate for precisely this reason.  For every news and feature story that has delved into the effects, say, of the “public option” or the “employer mandate,” a hundred have dwelt on the chances of legislative passage, or on the political winners and losers.

Comes now the leaked e-mail  messages from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, just days before an important environmental summit in Copenhagen, and the question is whether the MSM, in the wake of it, will finally treat the subject of global warning with the care and objectivity that such a complex subject demands.

Even without so-called cap-and-trade legislation looming on the congressional horizon, the many national and international environmental laws that are now being implemented or considered require that global warming be closely scrutinized for its scientific findings, and for the impact and efficacy of any public policies as may be pursued in consequence.  The unseemly aspects of the CRU correspondence simply adds fuel to what should be a brightly burning subject even without it.

Consider, for instance, the critical linkages that have to be established and explained if “global warming” is to be understood by people generally (as distinguished from “warmists” or “skeptics”), as a subject they should care about.

First, it has to be clear that warming is happening, and that it is man-made, a subject about which there was, in fact, debate even before the CRU debacle.  Then it has to be determined that said warming is of such peril something needs to be done about it.  (Again, the subject of debate.)  Then, of course, it has to be shown that there is something that can be done about it.  And finally, we have to know that what we do won’t have negative consequences (like, for instance, on the economy) that are worse than the effects of the warming itself.

Seen in this way the opinions of climatologists are just one element, and not even the most important one, that needs to be considered and fully examined.  But is that happening in the coverage of this issue by the MSM?  Doesn’t look like it.  Instead, as with their coverage of health care reform, news stories about global warming tend to be either (1) preposterously opinionated, and wrapped in the familiar blather of political correctness, or (2) woefully superficial, a consequence of their horse-race aspects and focus not on substance but on the political sideshow.

Hardly a day goes by without someone, somewhere, lamenting the prospective demise of journalism, by which they mean, even if they don’t say so, what we have come to call the mainstream media – the broadcast networks, big-city papers, the newsweeklies, the wire services.  But as shown in their coverage of global warming and health care reform, today’s MSM appear to be adrift, and operating apart not only from their traditions, but also from what is in their own, and our, best interest.

Cross-posted in Huffington Post, here.