Today's NY Times ran a front-page (or rather home-page) piece, the headline for which is demonstrably false. The headline claims that the "U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege".
Hmm, well that does sound like important news, given that these were the folks who shared the Nobel Prize some years back with Al Gore, and are probably the most public face for climate change science in the world. If they are facing a "Credibility Siege", well then, the reasonable reader might surmise, perhaps the credibility of global warming science should be placed into doubt.
A quick read of the piece, shows, however, that the "siege" is coming from a few far-right corporate news sources in Britain, from one Christopher Monckton, "a leading climate skeptic" (what makes him "leading", it would seem, is the propensity of these corporate news outlets to quote him), and from an organization called the Science and Public Policy Institute - clearly another cooked "news and opinion" factory paid for by the industries to be affected by any climate change legislation. In short, spin factories twisting the truth and contaminating the public debate, working directly for large economic interests.
It doesn't take many minutes of online research to determine this. However, the spin-makers know that this will not commonly happen - that this "news", blessed with the imprimatur of the NY Times, will be picked up by the rest of the corporate media and spread like wildfire - not to mention serving as more fuel for the idiocy-spouting hate-mongers of Fox, etc.
If you read into the 8th or 9th paragraph of the Times piece, it does give Dr. Pachauri (the head of the Panel "under siege") a chance to defend himself from the perverted smears being thrown at him. But in general, the story is a great example of the typical twisted use of "objective" journalism. Objective? Bullshit. Absolutely atrocious (and dangerous!) journalism by the so-called "liberal" (huh?) NY Times.
