Saturday, August 04, 2007

With Murdoch, will Wall Street Journal come around on global warming?

The Wall Street Journal editorial pages are one of the more notable MSM holdouts on climate change (see this post on realclimate for an example)

The great Bob Parks wonders in his "What's New" newsletter if Murdoch's takeover of the WSJ will change that:
Last week, WN predicted that if news mogul Richard Murdoch was successful in acquiring the WSJ, its editorial policy on climate would not get greener. Several readers, however, pointed out that Murdoch may have had a recent epiphany on climate. Indeed, Monday's New York Times quoted a May 8 Murdoch speech, "Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats." To demonstrate his conversion, he went out and bought a Prius for a lot less than it cost him to buy Dow Jones. "The debate is shifting," he said, "from whether climate change is really happening to how to solve it." Is that enough to change the WSJ? I don't know.

Murdoch explains his green turn in an interview at Grist.

I'm with Bob's initial reaction. Fox news hasn't changed their denial-tinged coverage so I doubt the WSJ editorial pages will change anything.

For you young blog readers out there: Bob Parks has been sending out his newsletter by email since before blogs and even before the world wide web. He has been debunking junk science and calling out climate denial flim-flam for a long time. Prof. Parks is a national treasure.

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