Two weeks ago the U.K. Guardian gleefully reported that the self-proclaimed “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg, the best-selling writer on the environment, professor, and director of the Copenhagen Consensus think tank, had made a serious acquiescence to the global warming climate change global climate disruption movement that could quite possibly change the face of the entire conversation. From the article:

The world’s most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and “a challenge humanity must confront”, in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.

Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled “sceptical environmentalist” once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN’s climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.

But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. “Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century,” the book concludes.

Lomborg has a unique voice in the climate change debate because while he has always believed in man-made climate change, he doesn’t believe it’s catastrophic nor does he subscribe to the Leonardo DiCaprio/Laurie David school of thought that massive cut backs in carbon emissions is the one and only way to fix the problem. So a “U-turn” from this stance would mean that after years of studying and writing on the matter, he’s all of a sudden become an Inconvenient Truther. Having met Mr. Lomborg just last year and being a fan of his work, this report made me highly… skeptical. (more…)

In November of 2007, with support from George Soros’ Open Society Institute, Live from the New York Public Library presented the conference, “There You Go Again: Orwell Comes to America.”  The conference brought together noted journalists, linguists, political consultants and others to discuss the practice of deceptive political speech in the arena of public discourse today, or as the conference referred to it, “propaganda and the new face of American politics.”

The title itself was a blend of the quote made famous by Ronald Reagan in his 1980 presidential debate retort to Jimmy Carter, and George Orwell’s writings and their application to media in politics today.

George Soros presented a session at the conference that in hindsight draws some striking parallels to what we have been witnessing in politics and the media today.  When viewed consecutively in their entirety, the three videos in which Soros makes his presentation are compelling and bring clarity to where so much of the rhetoric on the left has been bred over the years.

It starts with Soros’ description of how propaganda has taken root in American politics and replaced truth with strategic deception.  Yet, considering the blatant manipulation of the truth in so many of today’s news stories, it reads more like a psy-ops manual for the left-wing media, labor unions and community organizers of today: (more…)

Recently Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley from 1996 to 2008 and prolific journalist/author, mourned “the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet’s most magnificent landforms,” the Himalayan glaciers.  In an LA Times opinion piece surveying what no longer works in the U.S., Schell cited areas like the environment, education, and transportation, and found American hopelessness, especially compared to contemporary China.

Schell’s “studying of melting glaciers” was likely related to a much-hyped warning from the World Wildlife Fund, which was revealed to be a sham, based on an anecdotal report.  But Schell’s warnings, along with his list of American failings, suggest a general ideological bias.

A recent challenge has been identifying the bias of the mainstream media.  Oddly enough, exposing ideological bias has long been a favored project in communication studies, usually practiced by leftists.  One method, much used by recent multicultural leftists, has held that consciousness and meaning are contingent social constructs.  Following such post-modernists as Lyotard, these folks regard discourse  as a composite of  linguistic, social, and cultural formulations.  One need only examine these to reveal the consciousness or mentality of an author or work. (more…)

Creative editing of direct quotations often lands journalists in trouble – for good reason.

The ellipsis, usually shown in print as a series of three dots ( … ) between words, is an important tool for the journalist. It signifies that words have been omitted. Without ellipses, extended quotations would drag on, weighted down with information irrelevant to the story at hand. The ellipsis allows the writer to leave in the important words and banish the unimportant ones.

Failing to use an ellipsis when it is called for is misleading at best and dishonest at worst, but that’s exactly what National Public Radio did in a report that makes a conservative legal commentator look bad.

Curt Levey, executive director of the right-leaning Committee for Justice, discussed the nomination of Goodwin Liu, a radical Berkeley law professor with some very unusual ideas about the law.

In case you haven’t been following it, President Obama has nominated Liu to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The reason pundits the nation over are paying close attention to the nomination is because they believe President Obama is grooming Liu as a future Supreme Court nominee.

If hostility to the Constitution were a prerequisite for the federal bench, the radical leftist Liu would be a shoo-in. Liu has said with a straight face that “free enterprise,” “private ownership of property,” and “limited government” are “code words for an ideological agenda hostile to environmental, workplace, and consumer protections.” Liu’s sentiments are reminiscent of deposed Ways and Means Committee chairman Charlie Rangel’s (D-N.Y.) infamous rant that tax-cutting is Republican code for racism. (more…)

Hope springs eternal for the future of the journalism whenever I eat at Tomboy’s Burgers. It’s not only the gloriously greasy burgers and hearty, artery-clogging breakfasts that draw me to Manhattan Beach a couple of weekends a month.  It’s the Los Angeles Times and the off chance that those who produce it will wake up and give what should be a great paper new life.

Only a matter of time now

I only read the Times at Tomboy’s, and I can only do so because there is usually a forlorn copy of it lying between the hot sauce and utensils.  My subscription lapsed years ago–I’m a casualty of the Times’s limp writing and consistent lefty spin–but something inside me still hopes to one day open up that paper and once again find something worth reading.  That did not happen on New Year’s Day.  Not by a longshot.

On New Year’s Day, the Times’s lead editorial was its annual 40 or so “Wishes for the New Year.” It was truly thought provoking, except the thought that was provoked was, “who the hell writes this stuff?” (more…)