If you’re ever looking for an exhibit to illustrate the establishment media’s inability to view issues other than through their desired prism, look no further than last Wednesday’s Washington Post editorial page. The lead edit was a shrill tantrum about Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli amending his Civil Investigative Demand for University of Virginia records involving applications and payments for taxpayer-funded grant money, in accordance with a recent judge’s ruling (which Cuccinelli is in the meantime appealing; having read the briefs and observed argument, I think this is easily the right call).

The editorial complaints are rather strange. These are that a) Cuccinelli is using old arguments in re-filing his request for documents — though such consistency of legal theory, tailored to reflect the judge’s ruling, would make sense in this context and surely WaPo would also flip out if the AG changed his arguments; and b) that Cuccinelli is actually looking into possible fraud against the taxpayer in this action under the Virginia anti-fraud statute, and not trying to put climate science on trial! See prior reply as to WaPo’s reaction if the opposite were true.

It is unfair of me to apply standards of rational thought to the clearly emotional WaPo, but this is really taking its bias to absurd depths. And beneath the edit — I speak literally, as it would be very difficult to actually go lower than the editorial — is a cartoon portraying Cuccinelli is the judge screaming at Galileo that he wants his emails. (more…)

If there’s one thing the Snowpocalypse-hastened collapse of the Great Global Warming Hoax has shown us, among other things, it’s that Mark Steyn, as usual, was right all along, and “Anthropogenic Global Warming” — ridiculous on its face, as anyone who knows history could have said, and did — was as much a journalistic scandal as a scientific one.  Writes Chris Wood at the Canadian Journalism Project:

In a twist on the old legal saw, it is the equivalent of failing to shout fire in a crowded theater that is slowly filling with deadly fumes.

To pass it off as journalism is professional negligence.

Now comes this challenge to the somnolent, Sarah-Palin obsessed American media: (more…)