STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• Comments
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

More

Share and Enjoy [?]

I was asked to give a speech last week on the topic of media bias.

Without re-creating the entire talk (why risk putting a second audience to sleep?), one point I mentioned is that media bias need not show up only in the form of a story slanted to one side.

Bias can also manifest itself in the stories the media chooses to cover and not cover and in the play those stories receive.

The day before my presentation, 700 miles away in Chapel Hill, N.C., Dr. William Gray, the famed climate scientist based at Colorado State University, gave a speech to students at the University of North Carolina, in which he called the concept of catastrophic man-made global warming "foolish.”

Gray's remarks seemed especially timely, given they were made on the same day Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work alerting the world to the supposed dangers of catastrophic man-made global warming.

But the media paid scant attention to Gray, even as it was falling over itself with coverage of Gore. The Sydney Morning Herald, as in Sydney, Australia, carried a story about Gray's speech.

It's not that Gray is a media pariah. His annual forecast on the number of hurricanes is dutifully reported and prominently displayed.

But when Gray talks about global warming – he's on the record as a strong skeptic of man-made global warming – the media barely notice.

Interestingly, Gray predicts most of us will live long enough to see he's right. While some contend it will be decades before the full effects of global warming are disastrously evident, Gray told the North Carolina audience he expects a global cooling period to begin soon, part of the Earth's natural cycle of warming and cooling. "We'll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realize how foolish it was," Gray is quoted in the Sydney paper as saying.

Is Gray right?

His record on predicting the number of hurricanes has been spotty of late.

In 2004 he and his team of researchers at CSU predicted 14 named storms and there were 16. Not bad.

But in 2005, he predicted 13 named storms. There were 31.

In 2006 Gray upped his prediction to 17 named storms. There were 10.

This year, Gray predicted 17 named storms and so far there have been 14.

It's not necessarily that Gray has the corner on truth and Al Gore is a fraud.

Nor is it that Gray's remarks to a few hundred people in a campus auditorium merit as much coverage as Gore's winning a major global accolade.

But you'd think, given the credibility lavished on Gray by the media on one weather topic – hurricanes – he would merit at least a few paragraphs somewhere closer to home than Sydney, Australia, when speaking on another weather phenomenon – global warming.

Media bias shows up, even in stories that don't show up.

E-mail Brent Batten at bebatten@naplesnews.com