The Grey Lady's Volte Face

Now, about that volte face by the Grey Lady. Remember how I amazingly predicted in several posts here on Planet Gore that, once the Kyoto narrative could no longer be about George W. Bush, the media would pivot and begin asserting things in the “but, of course . . .” vein? (As if they’ve always been reporting things in a balanced way, even though for seven years they refused to acknowledge, obfuscated, and even flat-out eh . . . misstated . . . certain inconvenient truths.)

So here we have that surprise entry the New York Times, mentioning in passing that “The Kyoto pact is widely seen as a faltering limited experiment, at best”. Gasp . . . choke . . . cough.More...



“Widely seen” — and yet, who knew? It of course isn’t so widely seen as to have been the subject of a Times story to that effect — one noting, say, how they’d been wrong in their cheerleading for the Kyoto treaty, and their strangely inaccurate and personal assaults on Bush’s position on it (which was, in practice, the same as the Clinton-Gore position, but somehow they avoided such scathing treatment, despite the fact that it actually was warming under Clinton-Gore, and not warming Bush).

In fact, before Kyoto’s came into effect the author of this piece (Andy Revkin) assailed and mischaracterized Bush’s judgment to eschew support for the pact, then studiously avoided mentioning the failure when the opportunity arose and, it seems, even gloating a tad during one of those annual false reports of a Bush reversal on the idea of such a treaty. When reporting on talks for a successor as late as this past summer, Andy only managed to throw in a closing line noting that Kyoto in practice wasn’t the gem it appeared (to some) in theory. But here we see that, in fact, it’s just . . . widely seen as a failure. Nothing to see here, move along (or perhaps “move on”?).

I must admit that I hadn’t realized the Times had changed its mind. You’d think that, given its long record of strident opposition to George W. Bush for his Kyoto skepticism, they would have announced the change with far more fanfare. But perhaps now that they are in the Bush camp, the Times will include Bush’s stalwart climate realism to their list of his administration’s accomplishments. (It might be asking too much of the Times to agree with Fred Barnes, who argues that standing “athwart mounting global warming hysteria [yelling] 'Stop!'” is Bush’s Number One acheivement).

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