Our local paper, The New London Day is really not a bad rag, but the editors there seem to be obsessed with placating a small but vocal number of local right wingers, who continually accuse it of bias, no matter how much it bends over backward to appease them. This recently led me to pen the following Letter to the Editor, about a global warming denying editorial cartoon it elected to publish.
A recent poll found that the typical conservative political candidate overestimated his or her district's conservatism by 20 points, while the typical liberal candidate overestimated the conservatism by around 5 percentage points. The effect on public policy that results has been pernicious, to say the least.
But politicians, of both the left and the right, are completely in tune with their constituents compared to the New London Day, which has historically tried to appease those that accuse it of a liberalism the rest of us can not perceive. Give it up, Editors. Nothing you do will stop the accusations.
Case in point: I was aghast to see the Day hand off editorial page space to a cartoonist who is a climate denier, which cartoon contained a factual assertion (that the icecaps are not melting) that is demonstrably untrue. Global warming is a fact. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that warming is attributable to man's actions. Denying this reality is, at this point, as absurd as claiming the earth is flat.
The Day was recklessly irresponsible in running this cartoon. It cannot be justified by the trope that “both sides” of an issue deserve to be presented to the public. Sometimes, there is only one side, and then there are the liars and propagandists. The fact that the Koch Brothers want us to believe that global warming is a myth does not make their arguments any more credible. Rather than helping to spread their lies, the Day should consider educating its readers about the right wing money machine that is seeking, now with the Day's help, to delude the American people into ignoring the most important issue of our times.
Well, the letter never got published, as it exceeded their word limit. Rather than sacrifice a single syllable of my deathless prose, I elected not to butcher it. And no, the fact that the citizens of New London County were spared this letter is not the good news. I haven't reached that yet.
The good news is that the LA Times has elected to go where the Day fears to tread:
The Los Angeles Times hit back at climate deniers on Tuesday while defending its decision to not publish op-ed letters that deny global warming.
The newspaper reiterated its position on the letters after Newsbusters, a conservative media watchdog, criticized its policy over the weekend. A Times editorial about Obamacare had noted that “ones that say there’s no sign humans have caused climate change” do not get printed.
Times' letters editor Paul Thornton addressed the criticism in another op-ed.
“Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published,” he explained. “Saying 'there's no sign humans have caused climate change' is not stating an opinion, it's asserting a factual inaccuracy.”
This truly is good news- a deviation from the typical media claim that it's not their job to differentiate between honest factual disputes and lies or delusions. Who knows, this may spread. There are signs on another front that the media is beginning to understand what we left wing bloggers have known for years: that both sides are not equally at fault for our dysfunctional government. It only took a government shutdown, the threat of default, and craziness so intense that even the corporations that thought they owned the Republican Party are now acknowledging that the inmates have taken over, but hey, it's still progress.
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