Newsweak Blows Hot and ColdI had one of those "Stop the Presses!" moments this week. That's when I read something in the so-called mainstream media that blows even my mind — someone who was a denizen of that institution for 20 years. I thought I had seen it all — from the inside and out. As a former editor-in-chief of daily newspapers, I have an exquisitely refined sense of propriety. I frequently served as a highly paid expert witness on newspaper standards and practices. My job often entailed cutting out biased copy from stories before they ever saw the light of day. Evidently, that's not the way it works in the "mainstream" news business anymore — at least not at Newsweek. (Or is it Newsweak?) Did you happen to catch last week's amazing cover story? The gist of this opus is that a "denial machine," bought and paid for by big industry, is preventing critical government action to stop global warming. One thing I've noticed about socialists and tyrants and those who do their bidding is they always accuse others of doing what they do. Here's a good example. Government and corporations have spent about $50 billion in the past 10 years promoting the hysterical notion that catastrophic, man-made global warming is going to destroy the planet unless we provide Al Gore and his friends with all the power they need to stop it. On the other hand, real scientists who are even remotely skeptical about these claims are denied grants and positions in academia. By comparison, the climate-change skeptics have spent less than $20 million in those 10 years, according to some estimates. Newsweek resorts to caricaturing the skeptics as "deniers," thus drawing allusions to those who wear tinfoil hats and deny the Holocaust. How bad was the reporting in Newsweak this week? So bad that one of the magazine's longtime contributing editors, the respected Robert J. Samuelson, follows it up this week with a scathing indictment, calling the cover story "highly contrived" and "fundamentally misleading." I'd say those were big-time understatements. As I write in my newest book, "Stop the Presses!: The Inside Story of the New Media Revolution," there's a reason you are inundated with global-warming hype in your daily newspapers and on your television newscasts — and it's not just because of the seismic spending differential. While Newsweak pretends there is a cabal that keeps the heating up of the planet a secret from the public, the reverse is true.
This little cabal has a name. It is called the Society of Environmental Journalists. Sounds innocent enough, but the results they achieve from inside America's newsrooms are nothing short of diabolically monopolistic. You simply can't cover environmental issues in America's newsroom culture unless you are a card-carrying member of the SEJ or subscribe to its activist approach to climate-change alarmism. Have you ever wondered why you only read and see one side of the story when it comes to "global warming"? Have you ever wondered why you have to read about or view a story on this subject every single day? Have you ever wondered whether this is more than a coincidence? The SEJ is the answer. The best way to control the flow of information from the news media is from the inside out. That's how the SEJ does it. They do it at Newsweek. They do it at the major TV networks. And they do it at your local newspaper, too. Some of them do it knowing what they are actually promoting: a big-government power grab. Some of them are just "useful idiots." Wherever there's a pet cause of the powerful, there's an activist group posing as journalists to promote it. Today it is global warming. But remember, just 30 years ago, Newsweak was promoting a coming ice age. To find out more about Joseph Farah and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
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