SoundBites July/August 2014

CNN‘s Brianna Keilar inexplicably interviews Ann Coulter

Worst Climate Coverage Ever?

What’s worse than having climate scientists debate denialists as if they both were legitimate points of view? Leaving out the scientists and letting global warming denial speak unrebutted. That’s what CNN (OutFront, 5/21/14) did when it brought on a right-wing provocateur as the lone guest to respond to a gameshow host’s Twitter-based attack (5/19/14) on climate science: “And ahead, Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak says global warming alarmists are unpatriotic. Tonight, Ann Coulter tells us why she agrees.”

Keystone XL’s ‘Symbolic’ Climate Destruction

The Washington Post’s Paul Kane (5/4/14) reported that the Keystone XL “pipeline’s political mythology runs up against the reality of its significance in the energy universe.” Both advocates and critics, it seems, are exaggerating the “politically symbolic” project’s importance.

The Washington Post dismisses Keystone XL’s devastating impact on the climate.

Even the rosiest estimates, Kane pointed out, predict just 9,000 jobs would be created, not a “game
changer.” Which is true—that’s only about 3 percent of the jobs created nationally in a single month. As for environmentalists’ worry about the 830,000 barrels of oil coursing daily through the proposed pipeline, Kane noted that the parts of the Keystone pipeline already approved “have the capacity to deliver 1.3 million barrels a day.”

But that would be a 64 percent increase in the pipeline’s capacity—and about 4 percent of the US’s daily consumption of oil. More to the point, there’s enough carbon in the Canadian tar sands the pipeline is intended to drain to add 120 parts per million of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere—as much again as the Industrial Revolution has managed to add over the past 150 years. That’s why climatologist James Hansen (New York Times, 5/9/12) says if tar sands exploitation isn’t stopped, it’s “game over for the climate.”

But as in so many Keystone stories (Extra!, 4/13), the words “climate change” or “global warming” don’t even appear in Kane’s article.

The Magic of Corporate Synergy

ABC’s Good Morning America (5/2/14) had an “exclusive” report on ABC’s parent company’s theme park: “We’ve got breaking news from Disney,” correspondent Ginger Zee explained. “It’s a new kind of magic at the Walt Disney World Resorts.” The magic, it turned out, was a new wristband, or as Zee put it, a “sort of magic wand that lets you do just about anything.” Viewers learned that the park is “a land of fantasy, growing bigger and helping our imaginations grow bigger every year.” They did not learn that Disney owns ABC.

Gingrich on Snowden: “such extraordinary arrogance.”

Snowden: Traitor or Criminal?

ABC This Week anchor Martha Raddatz (5/11/14) introduced a segment on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden by saying, “A year later, Snowden still sparks a raging debate.” She didn’t mean on her show, though. Instead, This Week viewers heard from former NSA chief Keith Alexander, whose viewpoint was that Snowden was a “traitor,” and former national security aide Richard Clarke, who said that Snowden “hurt our counterterrorism efforts.”

A similarly narrow spectrum of views was seen on NBC’s Meet the Press (6/1/14), which pitted former House Speaker Newt Gingrich—arguing that Snowden was “a traitor…aiding and abetting the enemy”—against former House Intelligence chair Jane Harman, who said he “should serve prison time.”

USA Today Exposes Bureaucratic Taxpaying

The front page of USA Today (5/23/14), which has a habit of going after federal workers (Extra!, 1/11), found a new complaint to make about them: They’re tax deadbeats, “delinquents” as the subhead had it. Reporter Gregory Korte’s piece,

“Fed Workers Owe $3.3B Taxes,” decried a big problem getting bigger:

In all, 318,462 federal employees owed back taxes as of last September 30—an increase of 2.6 percent from the previous year. That puts the average tax bill at $10,391, according to IRS data obtained by USA Today under the Freedom of Information Act.

Then you get to paragraph 3, which says: “But federal workers are better at paying their taxes than the average taxpayer. Their delinquency rate of 3.19 percent is far lower than the 8.7 percent for the population at large.” So a more accurate headline for the story would be “Fed Workers Good at Paying Taxes”—but that would have eliminated the story’s point, which was to grind the paper’s anti–civil servant ax.

The CIA and Polio’s Return

Polio, once battled to near-extinction, is now an international public health emergency, the World Health Organization declared. It cited 68 new cases this year, nearly 80 percent of which are in Pakistan.

Why? The New York Times’ Donald McNeil (5/6/14) explained, “Polio has never been eliminated there, Taliban factions have forbidden vaccinations in North Waziristan for years, and those elsewhere have murdered vaccine teams.” A Times editorial (5/6/14) said polio had returned “largely because Taliban factions have forbidden vaccinations in conservative tribal areas and attacked healthcare workers elsewhere.”

CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley (5/5/14) likewise reported, “Most cases are in Pakistan, where vaccine workers have been murdered on suspicion that they’re spying for the United States.”

What these and most other outlets left out is that supposed vaccine workers had been spying for the United States; as the Guardian (7/11/11) had revealed, the CIA used a fake vaccine campaign to gather DNA to confirm Osama bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan. The Times’ McNeil (7/9/12) had reported that this pretense led to vaccination teams being attacked and even banned from parts of Pakistan. When the predictable consequences of that reaction came to pass, however, McNeil and others neglected to mention the CIA’s role in encouraging the return of polio.

Elizabeth Warren: Two Views

“Some moderate Democrats fear her economic populism is a dead end for the party. But to her admirers, she is a political celebrity.”—Jeff Zeleny (ABC’s This Week, 4/27/14)