[lara]

How did he blow it? Like many of us, he doesn't believe in global warming and stuck to his guns. He is entitled to his opinion, just as you are.

[marajade]

He used the NYT as a source who misrepresented the report. Have you read any of the threads?

[quidnunc]

WHAT U-TURN? I know I'll be excoriated as a Bush toady for saying this, but I don't actually get the notion that the Bush administration has done a palpable U-turn on global warming. Check out this story. "Last year, the White House described climate change as a serious issue after seeking opinions of the National Academy of Sciences but was undecided about how much of the problem should be blamed on human activities," the Associated Press reports. This year, in a report to the U.N. no less, the administration argues that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." Wow. What a change. And no one is claiming that the Bush administration has shifted actual policy. It's also a grotesque distortion to say that most conservatives completely rebut the notion of some human effect on global warming. Certainly Bjorn Lomborg acknowledges it. My own view of this weird little summer story is that it's a major Howell Raines coup. 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. Chill, guys. It seems to me that the Bush administration has long held the sensible skeptical position (which does not preclude taking human impact on global warming seriously). The difference between them and Al Gore is that they don't take this as a certainty or buy the notion you have to throw the economy into reverse to prevent it.

RAINES OF TERROR: Did you get through that New Yorker Ken Fellata piece on the New York Times under Howell Raines? Okay, I did. But I share Tim Noah's skepticism about the caveats in the piece about the Times' doing well under Raines. Pulitzers are establishment prizes given to establishment friends (with occasional credentializing outreach). And as Tim points out, "Chatterbox would argue that a major newspaper that can't sweep the Pulitzers in a year when a gigantic disaster befalls its hometown is a very poor newspaper indeed. The awards are as much for the disaster as they are for the coverage." I'm not just saying this because Mr Raines banished me, but I used to feel I was missing something when my Times didn't get delivered and I read the Washington Post instead. Now I don't. What I got from Auletta's piece was that Raines is a left-liberal populist ideologue, who likes to big foot his reporters and editors. Not that there's anything wrong with it! There are plenty of great editors who have been from a similar mold, and having a crusading, left-liberal paper, with more pop-culture and vivid writing could be a great addition to the reading world. But one thing it isn't: the paper of record. It has excised almost all non-left commentary from its op-ed and editorial columns. It is skewing news coverage in ways that will please Nation-readers — like the hysterical Enron coverage, the bogus poll designed to argue that the public blamed Bush for Enron, or the burying of politically incorrect studies about the validity of racial profiling in speeding tickets. And it's increasingly happy assuming its readers agree with it. So it explains less and hectors and preens more. Again, this is fine. But let's acknowledge what it is. Raines is on a crusade for the populist left. And Raines is now the New York Times.

-snip-

(Andrew Sullivan in the Daily Dish, June 4, 2002)
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