Last week, the Media Research Center announced the “Best Notable Quotables of 2014,” and NewsBusters is reviewing the list as a way to reflect on the worst media bias of the year.
Today: the Planet in Peril Award for Climate Hysteria. For years, liberals have claimed climate scientists are of one mind on the existence of destructive, human-induced climate change, and tried to leverage this supposed unanimity to force conformity on preferred liberal policy solutions (i.e., more taxes and more regulations). This year, journalists ramped up the name-calling against the “denialists” who dispute any element of the liberal story on climate change.
“Man-made climate change happens. Man-made climate change kills a lot of people. It’s going to kill a lot more. We have laws on the books to punish anyone whose lies contribute to people’s deaths. It’s time to punish the climate-change liars....Denialists should face jail. They should face fines....I’m talking about Rush and his multi-million-dollar ilk in the disinformation business. I’m talking about Americans for Prosperity and the businesses and billionaires who back its obfuscatory propaganda....Those malcontents must be punished and stopped.”
Next in line, New York Times political reporter Nicholas Confessore, who had a classic liberal media response to an October 6 conversation on MSNBC’s Morning Joe about religious extremism being a threat to civilization:
Co-host Joe Scarborough: “What’s a greater threat to civilization, Christian extremism, Jewish extremism or Muslim extremism?”
NBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin: “To civilization?...I would not say any of those. I would not say radical Islam is the greatest threat to civilization today.”
Scarborough: “What is?”
New York Times political reporter Nicholas Confessore: “Global warming.”
On April 6, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation and denounced conservatives as “Trotskyite radical” for not agreeing with liberals on climate change:
“So your son or daughter has a disease and you go to 100 doctors — 97 percent of them, 97 of the hundred say, ‘This is the cause and this is the cure,’ and three percent say, ‘This is the cause, this is the cure.’ That is what it is on the climate science: 97 percent of experts say this, three percent say that and conservatives are saying ‘I’m going go to with the three percent.’ That’s not conservative, that’s Trotskyite radical.”
Finally, HBO Real Time host Bill Maher was invited onto MSNBC’s Hardball on September 10, where he mocked the public’s concern over the ISIS terrorists who had just beheaded two Americans:
“Do we really need to make a bogey man out of everybody? I get it that ISIS is bad, but they’re not that different than so many other Islamic villains....The other day, Hillary Clinton said something I thought was very smart, which was that global warming...is the biggest issue that we should be afraid of. And I agree. I am much more afraid of ice, as in melting, than I am about ISIS.”
Tomorrow, the Obama’s Orderlies Award for Championing ObamaCare. Check out the full awards issue, with 14 categories and Quote of the Year, at www.MRC.org.
