Posted on 06/04/2002 5:08:37 PM PDT by RFH
Global Heat or Heavy Raines? Yesterday's environmental disturbance may have been caused by human intervention. By Mickey Kaus Updated Tuesday, June 4, 2002, at 4:29 PM PT
Is the two-day global warming controversy an example of Raines Power -- the ability of the new populist, activist, bigfooting editor of the NYT to singlehandedly shape the national debate? That's what Andrew Sullivan suggests:
A reporter finds some tiny and insignificant change in the wording of administration policy, and Raines puts it on his front page. Drudge takes the bait and Rush follows.
Sullivan's on to something, I suspect. The original NYT story, written by Andrew Revkin, has a lot of artificial story-heightening language ("stark shift ...sharp contrast") including this prize-winning attempt to manufacture confrontation from ambiguity:
Despite arguments by oil industry groups that the evidence is not yet clear, the report unambiguously states that humans are the likely cause of most of the recent warming
If it's only "likely," then the evidence isn't really unambiguous, is it? (Actually, the report said "likely mostly"!) ... Two qualifications to Sullivan's Raines theory:
1) Signs suggest it wasn't a lone reporter finding some tiny and insignificant change in the wording of a report, but rather a tacitly coordinated campaign by enviros to embarrass the Bush administration with the report of its own EPA. The smoking gun for this theory? The NYT ran an editorial on the global warming report the same day as Revkin's news story. Normally, when a lone reporter gets a scoop, he jealously guards it -- then once it's out, the ed page follows a day or two later. In this case, everyone in the enviro community apparently knew the report was due, including the NYT ed board.
2) The central, and (likely!) bogus, aspect of Revkin's story -- a selling point that helped get it on the front page and that sold it to Drudge -- was the idea that the EPA's report represented some sort of deliberate attempt by Bush to go a bit green to enhance his political appeal. Revkin offers basically no evidence of this, aside from his own speculation that
The distancing could be an effort to rebuild Mr. Bush's environmental credentials after a bruising stretch of defeats on stances that favor energy production over conservation, notably the failure to win a Senate vote opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to exploratory oil drilling.
Indeed, it's hard to believe that Revkin didn't know this "green shift" angle was phony (as Bush now says it is.) Rivkin himself noted that the report proposes no change in policy and has "alienated environmentalists." Plus a "senior administration official involved in climate policy played down the significance of the report" to Revkin himself. When the Bush administration wants to make a deliberate credential-burnishing shift to the left or the right, they leak it to the Times, but also call a press conference and maybe stage an event to get the word out. They don't quietly put a report on the Web and then, when the Times calls, pooh-pooh it. ... So why is the bogus angle in there? It's just as likely to be Raines bigfooting -- exhibiting the I-instinctively-know-what's-really-going-on-so-stick-this-in-your-piece arrogance described in Ken Auletta's New Yorker profile. Or it could be a reporter doing what he had to do to get his story on Page A-1. The least likely possibility is that Raines, pursuing a liberal environmentalist agenda, stuck in the bogus angle in order to get the story on the front page (where it could enrage Limbaugh, etc.) Raines didn't need a phony angle to put the piece on the front page -- he could have stuck it there anyway. He's editor of the paper! And a more accurate angle of "Bush's own EPA contradicts his global warming position" would be just as anti-Bush, and more in keeping with the goal of enviro activists, than a piece giving Bush points for having deliberately shifted in a green direction when he hasn't. ...
P.S.: If the Times really is going to use the A1-to-Drudge-to-Limbaugh megaphone in an attempt to actually influence administration policy, it may find itself running into the Dowd Effect, which is George W. Bush's instinctive tendency to react against any idea suggested by the libs at the NYT. The effect is familiar to Mary Matalin, whose favorable mention in a Dowd column hurt her standing in the White House In this case, if Bush was ever going to embrace the E.P.A. report, he isn't going to now. ... Of course, that may mean the Times story was a bit of fiendishly clever reverse psychology on Raines' part to maneuver the President into un-burnishing his environmental credentials. But I doubt it. And a real enviro would want Bush to actually embrace the conclusion that humans are causing global warming. That would shift the baseline of the debate and raise more powerfully the question, "what are you going to do about it?"
P.P. S.: If you are looking for something to do about it (that doesn't involve embracing the onerous Kyoto Protocol), Gregg Easterbrook lays out an effective, do-able, non-Kyoto agenda in this excellent New Republic piece.
You find this statement "insignificant"?
Its hocus-pocus voodoo science that masks a socialist agenda.
Brian.
(Slapping forehead)
Why of course that explains it! What a fool I am, not to have seen the connection myself!
Being unable to read minds -- Rush Limbaugh's or anyone else's -- I sure don't. If someone asked me to guess I'd say an honest quarrel about policy and principle, based on bad or insufficient evidence (the NY Times spin of an EPA report).
Unfortunately, way too many folks got suckered by that Reagan-hating little creep, Howell Raines.
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