July 11, 2013

The Wall Street Journal as a mouthpiece

Today I was looking at science stories on Google News and noticed an interesting item.  It was a link to a story at the Wall Street Journal titled "Networks Do 92 Climate Change Stories; Fail to Mention 'Lull' in Warming."

Interested, I took a look at the story (I don't think it deserves to be called an article) and read through it.  It is quite obviously written from a climate change denialist point of view, and the conclusions are flawed regarding global temperature changes over the last 15 years (see here for an actual scientific explanation).  It is very easy to do a little fact-checking and find how the story's premise (that there is a 'lull' in global temperature increases) is simply wrong.

I then noticed the byline:


Media Research Center?  What is that exactly?

I Googled it and found that it is a far-right conservative "watchdog" organization (although they only play watchdog to 'liberal' media, apparently).

How does the WSJ end up being a mouthpiece for this loony group?

I don't get it.