ABC's Global Warming Reporter Doesn't Like the Word "Balance"

According to ABC News Reporter Bill Blakemore, the guy who reports extensively on global warming issues, "balance" is no longer required in global warming reporting. In fact, in his view global warming skeptics are to be ignored (from the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works):

ABC News Reporter Bill Blakemore declared “I don’t like the word ‘balance’ much at all” in global warming coverage at a journalism conference in Vermont over the weekend.

Blakemore, who reported on August 30, 2006, “After extensive searches, ABC News has found no such [scientific] debate” on global warming, (http://abcnews.go.com/US/print?id=2374968) said he rejects ‘balance’ in order to justify excluding any skeptics of manmade catastrophic global warming from his reporting. He made his remarks at Friday’s panel discussion at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference in Burlington.

Blakemore lamented “the deep professional shame that I discovered two years ago,” regarding how he believes the media had been manipulated by skeptics of manmade catastrophic global warming.

“Of course [skeptics] play on the idea that we have to be ‘balanced,’” he noted.

“It was very lazy of us for 10 years when we were asked for balance from the [climate skeptic] spinners. We just gave up and said ‘Okay, okay – I will put the other side on, okay are you happy now?’” he said. “And it saves us from the trouble of having to check out the fact that these other sides were the proverbial flat earth society.”

Blakemore also took on the role of psychologist in explaining that global warming presents an “existential” dilemma and people face what he termed “psychological obstacles” about whether to believe the dire predictions that the planet is facing a climate crisis.

Well, as a fellow flat-earther in Blakemore's view, I still believe that it's the job of the media to present both sides of the debate anytime there are two legitimate sides of the debate. However, who am I to tell a "professional journalist" how to do his job:

“The problem is we journalists have not stood up on our own feet and said ‘Excuse me, this is going to be my assessment of where the scientific assessment is.’ Because those spinners would say you got to listen to who -- for the scientific assessment and they will point to their favorable [skeptical] organizations.” He also said, “I am a professional journalist; don’t tell me how to do my job.”

Blakemore said skeptics of global warming should be ignored because some of them are being funded by industry. But he has failed to note that scientists he promotes such as James Hansen, Michael Oppenheimer, are both recipients of huge sums of money from environmental special interest groups.

When Blakemore reported on January 29, 2006, that NASA scientist James Hansen was alleging that the Bush Administration was censoring his scientific work, he failed to inform viewers that Hansen had received a quarter of a million dollars from Teresa Heinz Kerry's foundation, the Heinz Foundation, and subsequently endorsed her husband Democrat John Kerry for President in 2004 http://www.abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1555183 In addition, Michael Oppenheimer is a paid partisan of the group Environmental Defense.

Blakemore also told the journalism conference that global warming was an ever present entity that “affects everything in the weather, everywhere all the time and in every instance.”

Blakemore has also lavished praised on Vice President Al Gore and his movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, comparing Gore to Shakespeare and Robert Frost. http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2006/05/al_gore_and_an_.html

Okay, now this is starting to sound like a Scrappleface parody. But sadly, it's not.