The Award for Nonexcellance in Climate Journalism Goes To ...

Okay, I think it’s pretty obvious to regular Climate Progress readers who the winner is.  Indeed, I was originally going to ask readers to vote on the winner from the top 10 list below — but it’d be like asking readers to vote for which major sports figure fell from grace farthest this year.  As always, though, I welcome your thoughts on the “winners” and any omissions.

I do a lot of media criticism, so I thought I would end the year with an award for the major media outlet and/or reporter who has moved furthest from journalistic excellence.  Next year I might name the award after this year’s winner, but for now, it’ll be named after Citizen Kane’s “Declaration of Principles,” which publisher Charles Foster Kane idealistically enunciated early on in the film classic, but later on “Without reading it, Kane tears it up, throws it into the wastebasket at his side.”  And no, I’m not including any of the “new media” in the list because none of them has even one-tenth the impact of any of the major media outlets on this list nor do most of them claim to be journalists.

And yes the entire media deserves a dishonorable mention for its generally poor coverage of climate science, politics, and economics this year:

• The clean energy revolution will not be televised, Part 2: Kathleen Hall Jamieson lambastes MSM for under-reporting climate bill
• U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm
• CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave “Hell (and High Water) on Earth” story — never mention climate change

Skipping the musical number I had prepared for the awards ceremony, let’s dive straight into the top ten list:

10.  Nicholas Dawidoff, the author of the NYT magazine cover profile on Freeman Dyson — not just because the piece was deeply flawed (the media does bad profiles all the time) but because the author apparently didn’t care:

• Media stunner: When asked “Does it matter, from a journalistic point of view, whether [Freeman Dyson is] right or whether he’s wrong?” his NYT profiler replies “Oh, absolutely not.”

9.  Fox News — just because they are dreadful on every subject doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be on this list:

• Fox News on EPA endangerment finding: “Some skeptics say regulating carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, may be a difficult task, especially since people emit carbon dioxide with every breath”
• Glenn Beck proves he’s a brainless frog, warning (?) “Barack Obama has galvanized the country…. He’s forced us to think!”
• Fox News blurts out its agenda: “Now that Jones has resigned, we need to follow through…. First, stop cap-and-trade, which could send these groups trillions,” and then put “the whole corrupt ‘green jobs’ concept outside the bounds of the political mainstream.”

8.  NYT’s John Tierney — the main reason he isn’t higher is that I’m not certain many people take him very seriously and his output level in print is on the low side (the second bullet below is actually from 12/26/08):

• John Tierney makes up stuff — does the New York Times employ several know/do-nothing fact checkers
• John Tierney IS the country’s worst science writer, not Gregg Easterbrook

7.  David Broder — uninterested in the gravest problem of our time (except, that is, when he writes nonsense about it), and more interested in quick decisions, than right ones: