Over at Newsbusters earlier this week, Scott Whitlock, the MRC's "senior news analyst," slammed ABC News' World News Tonight
for having "hid[den] the identity of a global warming activist." The
gripe was that the network had shown a clip of climatologist Heidi
Cullen talking about climate change without noting Cullen's connection
to Climate Central, an advocacy group. Whitlock apparently couldn't be
bothered to actually watch the broadcast he was purportedly
critiquing--in the broadcast that occurred in the real world, the name
of Cullen's group appeared in huge letters beside her face as she spoke.
Zachary Pleat, over at Media Matters, appropriately scolded Whitlock for this embarrassing error and Whitlock subsequently issued a semi-correction.
What no one appears to have noted about the incident (except, of course, this writer, in a comment on Pleat's article) is that, while the MRC
"senior news analyst" was bashing a network for quoting a climatologist
on climate change without noting her "advocacy" on the issue--very
dubious as a sin, even if it actually had happened--he, himself, had
declined to disclose the fact that his own organization has taken
hundreds of thousands of dollars from Big Oil, in an article in which
he's writing about one of Big Oil's pet causes. As I wrote last month, Big Oil finances the climate change denial industry, of which the MRC is a part.
Whitlock's behavior in concealing this isn't aberrant; it's standard
operating procedure at the MRC. The Center's gang of regulars constantly
churn out articles that parrot Big Oil propaganda on issues like climate change, gas prices, and domestic drilling, yet, as far as I've been able to determine, not one of these articles has ever disclosed these contributions.
--j.
