CNN’s senior media correspondent says there’s no need for journalists to provide a voice to those who question global warming or the threat it poses.
“Let’s begin with an important journalistic statement,” Brian Stelter declared Sunday on his show, CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” “Some stories don’t have two sides. Some stories are simply true. There’s no necessity to give equal time to the ‘other side.’ One of these is climate change. Depending on which study or which expert you consult, between 95 and 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is happening now, that it’s damaging the planet and that’s it’s manmade. That seems pretty definitive, right?”
True to his opening “important journalistic statement,” Stelter then gave the floor to two guests who agreed with his position.
Stelter’s stance echoes President Barack Obama’s, who declared in January’s State of the Union Address that “the debate is settled” on global warming.
Addressing this issue in his Friday column, conservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer argued there is “nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge.”
“If climate science is settled, why do its predictions keep changing?” he asked. “And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken?”
“I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,” Krauthammer conceded. “I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30 or 50 years are white-coated propagandists.”