Editorial vs. News: The Wall Street Journal Contradicts Itself on Global Warming

The Wall Street Journal is universally admired among journalists for its news and analysis; for its editorial page, not so much. A spectacular example of the latter’s ability to mislead appeared yesterday, under the cute title Not So Hot, in which the anonymous editorializers adroitly attacked NASA, environmentalists, climate change models, and climatologists James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt over a statistically insignificant data correction. The misleading editorial was rewarded with great popularity, as the piece was the second most emailed of the day, right after a feature on beer pong.

But interestingly, two weeks ago the number-crunchers at the WSJ ran a feature analyzing the exact same controversy in the column called The Numbers Guy, prosaically entitled "Global Warming Debate Overheats with Bad Numbers." This gives Grist readers a unique opportunity to compare the WSJ news-and-analysis team versus the WSJ editorial team. Judge for yourself via this post on Grist:

 

Published by Kit Stolz

I'm a freelance reporter and writer based in Ventura County.

One thought on “Editorial vs. News: The Wall Street Journal Contradicts Itself on Global Warming

  1. The rightwing crew that runs the WSJ ed page are people who really believe, in their arrogance, that everyone else is wrong. It’s a sad commentary on where we are really headed, when shite like this hits the media castles. When the last person on Earth dies, from the impact of global warming, say year 3500 or so, A.D. (sic), will he or she be reading the WSJ? Probably. And the editorial will still be saying the same thing: “There’s no such thing as global warming…”

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