Here’s a letter I submitted a few weeks ago to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, but which has not been published. I’ve added some hyperlinks, but the text is otherwise unaltered.

Last month, Slate.compublished a transcript of a secret audio recording of a “town-hall” that New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet held with the paper’s staff regarding the Times’s coverage of the Trump presidency. One of the key takeaways was that the Times’ coverage of “Russiagate” was driven as much or more by established narrative as by emerging evidence – or lack of evidence – and that now that the Mueller report has basically put that story to rest, it was time for a new anti-Trump narrative. That turned out to be “Trump is racist,” a narrative that would drive the paper’s coverage going forward, and which led to the “1619 Project,” a series of articles based on the premise that the legacy of slavery still underpins virtually all American institutions. Never mind the facts, the historical context, or other opinions – it was the narrative that counted.

As at the Times, so at the Gazette in its “Covering Climate Now” series. What’s the narrative? Let me quote the opening of one of the articles in the series: “It’s a problem threatening our very existence on Earth.” Not “is it” an existential problem, but “it is” an existential problem. Case closed, narrative established. But while there is consensus (which I agree with) that the earth is warming and that much of the warming is attributable to human action, there is no such consensus that warming threatens human existence. Read the likes of Dr. Judith Curry and Bjorn Lomborg, check out “Watts Up With That?” blog, and read the reports of the IPCC, and you might come away with a far less dire prognosis of the earth’s future health. Of course, even bringing this up gets one ostracized by climate alarmists and activist scientists, and will doubtless lead to furious letters in response, but that doesn’t mean that these heterodox opinions are invalid. The Gazette, like the Times, disserves its readership (which doesn’t look to the Gazette’s staff to be its thought leaders), and damages its journalistic reputation by its narrative-first coverage, and by suppressing the evidence that does not fit the narrative.