After hyping itself as antidote to fake news, New York Times hires extreme climate denier

[babylonsister]

https://thinkprogress.org/new-york-times-hires-extreme-climate-denier-after-hyping-itself-as-antidote-to-fake-news-441826c4071d


Dr. Joe Romm is Founding Editor of Climate Progress, “the indispensable blog,” as NY Times columnist Tom Friedman describes it.
Apr 13

After hyping itself as antidote to fake news, New York Times hires extreme climate denier
New columnist Bret Stephens dismisses as “imaginary” the climate reality routinely reported by the Times. They can’t both be right.


The New York Times — which advertises itself as a defender of truth in the Trump era — just hired an extreme denier of climate science as a columnist.

Bret Stephens was most recently deputy editorial page editor for Rupert Murdoch’s deeply conservative and climate-denying Wall Street Journal, where, in 2015, he wrote that climate change — along with hunger in America, campus rape statistics, and institutionalized racism— are “imaginary enemies.” He will now take those views to the New York Times.

Stephens is unusually extreme and divisive even for a climate science denier, also comparing scientists and those who accept their findings to Stalinists, anti-semites, and communists.

The scientific findings that Stephens has repeatedly dismissed as “imaginary” are routinely published in the New York Times itself. And in an August job description, the New York Times called climate change “the most important story in the world.” Stephens calls it “hysteria.”

This hiring is “a very sad comment on the New York Times’ judgment,” Dr. Robert J. Brulle, a media expert at Drexel University, told ThinkProgress via email. Brulle, whom the Times itself has called “an expert on environmental communications,” said this hiring “contradicts their claim” in a new ad campaign that truth is “now more important than ever” to the Times.

snip//

Climatologist Michael Mann warned in a 2014 Times op-ed that “a fringe minority of our populace clings to an irrational rejection of well-established science {which also} infects the halls of Congress, the pages of leading newspapers and what we see on TV.”

On Thursday, Mann told ThinkProgress via email, “sadly, the New York Times itself seems to have fallen victim to this malady, hiring one one of the most notorious climate change deniers, Bret Stephens, to promote climate denial propaganda on the once-hallowed pages of the Grey Lady.”

Brulle said “the New York Times should rescind his hiring.”

If not, what exactly do they stand for and why should anyone read them?

[world wide wally]

1. Stupid

[Johonny]

2. won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2013

so I don't think they can blame them for hiring a guy with a Pulitzer.

[babylonsister]

3. They can be blamed for talking out of both sides of their mouth, so to speak. nt