clipped from eyeonmiami.blogspot.com

The magazine of Columbia University has published an excellent article, tracing public attitudes toward global warming over time. The report gives credence to a point of view that the mainstream media failed to give global warming the weight it deserved. The Miami Herald, for example, now regularly publishes stories on global warming-- but its past omissions are not forgotten. For years, the Herald editors failed to give appropriate balance to the topic. It would be interesting to poll past Herald editors and journalists, how that happened.

"Oxford political scientist Maxwell Boykoff has coined a term to describe the U.S. media’s mishandling of global warming: “balance as bias.” Journalists in this country gave undue attention to climate skeptics for more than a decade beginning in the early 1990s, Boykoff has written, partly because they didn’t understand the science and partly because elected leaders like George W. Bush championed the contrarians."