What should be the new Washington Post logo
Brad Johnson has some disturbing news:
The Volokh Conspiracy, a blog of climate conspiracy theorists, is now part of the Washington Post.
When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took over the Washington Post, some climate activists hoped he would close down the Post’s editorial support for climate-science deniers such as George Will and strengthen the influential paper’s focus on the climate threat.
Instead, the opposite has happened.
In the first major move since the acquisition, Bezos has replaced liberal “wunderkind” blogger Ezra Klein with the corporate-right lawyer blog Volokh Conspiracy, founded by Eugene Volokh in 2002.
The Volokh Conspiracy bloggers are aptly named, as they have promoted conspiracy theories about anthropogenic climate change and the scientists who study it.
And Johnson provides a list of links to Volokh writers promoting even
repeatedly debunked attacks on climate scientists, and generally dismissing what is the
overwhelming and settled
scientific consensus. Johnson notes that one Volokh writer even lauded the insipid idiot
Sarah Palin for her insipid idiocy on climate change, during her 2008 train-wreck debate performance against then soon-to-be Vice President Joe Biden. And even worse, the
Post is peddling the site's garbage as
news, rather than as opinion, much less as the conspiracy-laden, anti-science opinion that it really is.
The traditional media's overall coverage of climate science is generally awful. With such overwhelming scientific evidence, the only responsible way to report it is to focus on that scientific evidence, with the urgency that the science and the scientists demand. The public remains confused, even as the warnings from scientists grow more dire. There is only one way that the public will be galvanized into forcing political action, and that is for the facts to be widely known. But the Washington Post now will be making that much more difficult. The Post's new partnership is not only reckless and irresponsible, it is dangerous.
1:52 PM PT: Media Matters has more.