NY Times Attacks Liberals As Snowflakes for Criticizing Hiring of Climate Denialist

[TomCADem]

The NY Times Public editor who defended the NY Times false equivalency between Hillary Clinton's e-mails and the myriad of scandals and questions about Donald Trump...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/public-editor/the-truth-about-false-balance.html

Is now suggesting that liberals are snow flakes for not being more open to fake news arguments attacking climate change by her newly hired columnist, Bret Stephens:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/public-editor/bret-stephens-climate-change-liz-spayd-public-editor.html

Jim Thomas is a gay man living in a red state. He has friends who voted for Donald Trump and he interacts daily with people whose political views he finds questionable. Which is fine, because he believes that hearing perspectives different from your own is essential to healthy public discourse. Only not the views of Bret Stephens, the newly hired conservative columnist on The New York Times’s Op-Ed pages.

Why not Stephens? Thomas sees in him a provocateur who intentionally tried to incite his audience by choosing for his first column a subject of urgent concern to the left. “What troubles me is that he had to have known that writing about climate for his debut column was a meaningful and disturbing choice,” Thomas said. The Missouri resident believes Stephens is trying to create niggling doubts about the dangers of climate change by employing a tactic similar to that of some industries that stand to lose from stiff environmental regulation.

Thomas is among the thousands of readers who have written in protest since Stephens, a conservative, took a seat among the elite, and mostly liberal, ranks of Times Opinion writers. His first column last weekend — arguing that climate data creates the misleading impression that we know what global warming’s impact will be — produced a fresh geyser of complaints, either to the public editor, on the letters pages or posted on the column itself. No subject since the election has come close to producing this kind of anger toward The Times. Among the scores who have taken to social media are several of Stephens’s new colleagues in the newsroom, some welcoming him aboard, others not so much. I expressed my own concerns about Stephens after his hiring, but I support the general principle of busting up the mostly liberal echo chamber around here.

Since his column published last weekend, I’ve been sifting through the rubble, poring over complaints and reaching some readers by phone. The goal wasn’t to resolve the finer points of atmospheric physics, but to get an answer to a simple question: Do you actually want a diversity of views on the Opinion pages, and if so, what’s the matter with Bret Stephens?

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Oh, jeez.

Climate denialists are wrong. Wrong. Wrong. In the same way that anyone who might seriously propose that the earth is flat or that the sun revolves around the earth is wrong.

Certain facts are well established. Climate change is one of them.

To hire someone who denies climate change is akin to hiring someone who really does think the Earth is flat. What the fuck are they thinking? Oh, excuse me. It's obvious they are not thinking at all.

As for diversity of views, there are astrologers out there who are far more credible than any climate change denier.

[WePurrsevere]

2. A "mostly liberal echo chamber"...

You say that like it's automatically a bad thing and it's not. A newspaper's main JOB is is to report and support FACTS. It should NOT encourage ignorance, especially by paying someone to spread it, since goodness knows that there's already more than enough of that out here.

If you want to publish pigpoo that's fine but don't add legitimacy to that stinky pile by hiring and paying people to plop that mess in my inbox/on my doorstep. Know your market... or lose it.