“Witnessing the impact of global warming in your life? ABC News wants to hear from you,” read the opening lines of a Web page at ABCNews.com.
“The differences can be large or small — altered blooming schedules, unusual animals that have arrived in your community,” or even “higher water levels encroaching on your property,” the item suggested.
The move by ABC probably would not surprise viewers who are familiar with reporter Bill Blakemore’s reports on global warming. In January, Blakemore hyped a story about tropical frogs being killed off by global warming. What Blakemore left out was that some scientists say that a fungus “most likely introduced by humans, possibly by ecotourists and/or field researchers” could be killing off the harlequin frog.
ABC’s request for global warming stories could multiply such false correlations by the thousands from uninformed viewers at home e-mailing the network.
“Essentially ABC is asking viewers to send in their anecdotes of warm weather, which it will claim are evidence of a warming climate,” OpinionJournal’s James Taranto complained on a June 20 post to his Best of the Web blog.
“When Al Gore gave a ‘global warming’ speech in
ABC’s attempt at promoting slanted citizen journalism is only the latest device the media are using to make 2006 the Summer of Gore. The Business & Media Institute has documented the media’s love affair with the former vice president’s anti-global warming crusade.
One magazine writer went as far as to laud Gore as a “scorned, washed-up politician transformed into a laptop-wielding ninja” aiming to “rescue the planet from the forces of greed and indifference”
The May 2006 “Fire and Ice” study by BMI took a comprehensive look at 110 years of faulty and over-hyped reporting by the media on the changing fads in popular climate change theory.