Brit Hume: Ghoul of global warming

Dear Mr. Hume,

I doubt that you intended to further tarnish your already sullied reputation in the journalism community, but your failure to exercise even an infinitesimal measure of professional skepticism this past Monday during a climate change segment of your Fox News program "Special Report" has made you the laughingstock of the industry.

This may not trouble you on a personal level, so long has it been since you enjoyed even a modicum of respect from those who still exhibit some degree of concern for fairness, accuracy and responsible reporting in the news. But there are bigger issues at stake, specifically the biggest public policy challenge facing civilization in many decades, if not history itself. Furthermore, while I have no specific memory of the days in which you were allegedly a genuine journalist (I grew up in Canada where your early reports received little attention), I have to believe that there might still reside somewhere in your brain some small yearning for credibility. It is to that theoretical remnant that I address this note.

I have serious doubts that such a desire can be realized, however, after Monday's decision to propagate one of the oldest fictions of climate science denial, the so-called Oregon Petition. On your program that night you quoted Lawrence Solomon writing in Canada's Financial Post

that a majority of astrophysicists and other solar scientists may in fact disagree with the conventional wisdom. He points out that almost 18,000 scientists signed a petition in opposition to the Kyoto Protocol...

Your first signal that perhaps something was not altogether proper should have been the source of the quote. The Financial Post is a notoriously anti-science publication with little credibility outside of of extreme robber-baron circles in Canada. But the definitive nail in the coffin of this story for you should have been the notion that there could possibly be 18,000 genuine scientists with an expertise in climate science opposed to what everyone who hasn't been hiding under a rock for the last 20 years knows is the general consensus on climate change.

It should have taken all of 20 seconds, or less, for you -- or your producers/researchers, for whom you are responsible, just as Dan Rather was responsible for his team's failure to verify the Bush AWOL forgery in 2004 -- to perform a quick Internet search for the terms "oregon" and "petition." You would have discovered, as did the good people at Media Matters, who blew the whistle on your failings for those of us without the patience to watch Fox News, that the petition is a fraud.

In fact, the petition has been so soundly debunked by so many authorities that it is remarkable you weren't already aware of the truth of the matter. It was designed to closely resemble a National Academy of Sciences report, although the NAS had nothing to do with it and has disavowed any association. More importantly, few, if any, of the signatories are genuine scientists, fewer still are climate experts, and many are purely fictitious. (Do "Drs. Honeycutt and Pierce" ring a bell?)

Instead, you chose not to exercise the slightest bit of skepticism about the story. Again, this probably is not a worry for someone who long ago abandoned journalistic principles of common decency. But it has taken so very long to convince a fair slice of the American public of the seriousness of climate change, despite an enormous campaign of misrepresentation by corporate interests, and the last thing we need is further efforts to revive a fiction that should be long dead, debunked and buried.

Mr. Hume, have you no shame?

In the future, when treading upon such issues, you would be wise to consult Media Matters' new section devoted exclusively to the misreporting of climate science: Climate of Fear.