This is a big week in American history. 150 years ago Tuesday the first shots were fired in the Civil War. The media has been covering the commemorations of the historic battle of Ft. Sumpter that really wasn’t much of a battle at all, the Confederate soldiers from the south took less than two days to defeat the Union soldiers from the north.

I talked about this historic week with a media friend of mine and mentioned how difficult the sacrifices were in this nation at the time. I said, “Republican President Abraham Lincoln was nearly defeated by the Democrat who ran the Confederate States, Jefferson Davis.” First my friend questioned the political party of Davis, then he said, “Why do you always have to enter politics into this?” Hmm, the Civil War was rather political—so I took the occasion to point out how the media likes to ignore the politics when it doesn’t work to their favor, but love to enter politics when it suits their needs. I mentioned the tragedy in Tucson where the media made up its own politics to fit its template.

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Custer at the Little Bighorn, the Kennedy Assassination, the Titanic: some disasters linger in the mind and the memory, coloring the way we look at the world, but bringing the dead past back to vivid life.

So far, the biggest surprise has to do with how spread out the debris was. Gallo said he expected to see one or two well-defined debris trails, but “the breakup was a little more complicated than that.” Unlike the largely intact (and iconic) bow section, the back section of the ship was “absolutely mangled by its trip to the bottom,” he said.

“It’s almost like you cracked it open and spilled everything out,” Gallo said. “You see pieces of the engine, boilers … where we thought there might be one or two big things, we found five. … When we start to piece together how Titanic actually made its way to the bottom, those pieces will be key.”

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Is the survival instinct finally begin to kick in for the MSM? Or will they simply gather on the decks and sing, “Nearer My God To Thee?”

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In my book Red Hot Lies, I dedicated chapter one to the media’s gullibility, and worse, in enabling the global warming industry. Media service to weather or climatic panics goes back more than a century. One particularly amusing anecdote is the Los Angeles Times, which was among many outlets seizing on the fear of frozen stuff on the heels of the Titanic’s sinking at the hands of an iceberg, digging up an academic to say that the expanding ice would soon consume us all.

OK, so that’s just yellow journalism. And of course there’s the absurd slop-slash-ignorance in slavishly toeing the alarmist line. For example, in 2008 NBC showed B-roll footage of penguins to add the texture of charismatic fauna to a story claiming that Arctic ice melt of 2007 was destroying the Arctic (whose “past the point of no return” ice mass has, ahem, returned).

The real news story was how the hell those birds might have gotten to the other side of the planet from where they live. Two months later, NBC showed polar bears in a story about a supposedly melting (but according to observations, actually ice-mass gaining) Antarctic. Again, school kids would spot these errors. (more…)

The New York Times continues its painful-to-watch demise with this published hissy-fit from the ultra-feminine side of the prophet of the-sky-is-really-falling gloom, Al Gore. Have your hankies at the ready, ladies.  Get your Pepto Bismol off the shelf, guys.

This piece of pure, dribbling, drooling emoting is going to either make you collapse in a torrent of tears or retch into the nearest barf bag.  The only human beings on the planet to whom this editorial would appeal are a bunch of 13-year-old girls without a single clue between them.

With hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, Al is going all out to save his “investment” in global warming hysteria.  Here, he comes up with histrionics befitting the amount of personal loss he stands to suffer.

His editorial begins: (more…)