climate change – Media Nation

My Northeastern students are back, this time with stories that should get more coverage

If you scan the top headlines, it might seem like the only stories in the news right now are ICE’s war against Minnesota and Donald Trump’s meltdown over Greenland. Venezuela is disappearing in the rearview mirror, but look out: here comes Snowmaggedon 2026.

But my media ethics students — yes, the same students who brought you their thoughts and suggestions earlier this week about practicing journalism in the AI era — have some different ideas. As I have in previous semesters, I asked them to identify stories that have been undercovered.

These stories have received some media attention or we wouldn’t know about them. But for one reason or another they haven’t broken through to the mainstream. Here is what they chose.

► Electoral unrest in Uganda, Reuters, Jan. 16. Amid accusations of election fraud, Ugandan opposition leader Bobi Wine was removed by the army from his house and taken to an unknown location, with President Yoweri Museveni claiming victory. The electoral campaign was marred by deadly violence, with the official count showing that Yoweri had been re-elected with nearly 74% of the vote, and Wine far behind at 23%.

► Data tallies ICE arrests in Boston, GBH News, Jan. 14. Reporter Sarah Betancourt found that at least 54 immigration-related arrests took place at Boston courthouses in 2025, with one so far in 2026. “We’re seeing ICE in the courthouses on an incredibly regular basis,” Jennifer Klein, director of the state’s Immigration Impact Unit told GBH News.

► How Florida is helping the feds, Tallahassee Democrat, Jan. 5. Using quickly thrown-together detention centers with names like Deportation Depot and Alligator Alcatraz, the state has detained about 20,000 people and turned them over to federal officials as part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ policy of assisting the Trump administration in its immigration crackdown.

► ACLU sues on behalf of federal arrestees, ACLU, Jan. 15. The class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of three community members who are challenging “the administration’s policy of racially profiling, unlawfully seizing, and unlawfully arresting,people without a warrant and without probable cause.”

► Climate change’s non-virtuous circle, Environmental Defense Fund, Jan. 20. Global warming caused by humans is speeding the release of greenhouse gas emissions from natural ecosystems. “These greenhouse gasses are a result of manmade climate change — they are indirect human emissions,” said Brian Buma, senior climate scientist at EDF.

► ICE List Wiki. This interactive database “documents incidents, agencies, individuals, facilities, vehicles, and legal authorities involved in enforcement operations.” According to The Daily Beast, the list — created by Crust News — is based on a leak of information about some 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol employees, provided by a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower following the shooting death of Renee Good in Minneapolis at the hands of ICE agent Jonathan Ross.

Now, I listed these stories in the order that I did deliberately. You’ll note that the first three come from mainstream news sources. The next two are press releases issued by respected advocacy organizations, the ACLU and the Environmental Defense Fund. The last isn’t a news story at all; rather, it’s a project put together by activists aimed at exposing the identities of federal agents involved in Trump’s crackdown on immigration.

Critics call this “doxxing,” but the ICE List doesn’t appear to contain any personal information beyond what you could look up about your local police department — whose officers, unlike ICE agents, do their jobs unmasked, with their badge numbers clearly displayed.

Essentially the first three are examples of traditional journalism while the last three are hybrids that combine advocacy with acts of journalism. I trust groups like the ACLU and the Environmental Defense Fund to offer accurate, truthful information, but it’s fair to wonder what relevant information they might have omitted.

As for Crust News and the ICE List Wiki, it’s an interesting idea, but it seems aimed more at news organizations that might make use of the data than it is at the general public. The site says that it “is designed for public use. Journalists, researchers, and advocacy groups use the data to track enforcement patterns, identify repeat agencies or jurisdictions, and contextualise individual incidents. Pages may be cited with attribution.”

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Three shining examples of enterprise reporting from The Boston Globe that you should know about

*A DEA drug bust in Norfolk, Va. Photo (cc) 2019 by the Office of Public Affairs for the U.S. Marshals Service.*

This morning I’d like to call your attention to three outstanding recent examples of enterprise journalism in The Boston Globe. On Friday I shared my last gift links for the month to The New York Times (those links should still work, by the way); the Globe, unfortunately, has a tight paywall with no gift links. One, however, is a podcast that you can listen to for free. So here we go.

“The DEA said it arrested 171 ‘high ranking’ Sinaloa Cartel members. A Spotlight investigation found that’s not true.,” by Andrew Ryan, Hanna Krueger, Joey Flechas, Steven Porter and Amanda Milkovits, and edited by Gordon Russell.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration has claimed that it’s made a major dent in the flow of illegal drugs in New England by arresting high-value suspects from a Latin American drug cartel. The Globe found that, in fact, the suspects were overwhelmingly “addicts, low-level dealers, shoplifters, and people living at a homeless encampment.” The Spotlight Team wrote:

“I can guarantee that he’s not part of the Sinaloa Cartel,” Scott Alati said of his son, Tyler, who was charged in state court in Franklin with a felony-level drug sale and immediately released without having to post bail. “He isn’t a high-ranking member of anything. He’s high-ranking dumb.”

In an editorial published today, the Globe asks: “If the Trump administration isn’t telling the truth about drug raids in New Hampshire, can people believe its rationale for killing supposed drug runners in the Caribbean?”

The answer is no. No, we can’t.

“Water is coming for the Seaport; the whole city will be poorer for it,” by Catherine Carlock and Yoohyun Jung. The story about how climate change threatens to inundate the Seaport District because of rising water levels is just one of a package. Other articles examine the effects of climate change-induced flooding on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester, the low-lying town of Hull, the pressure on levees in cities like Chicopee, and what is happening in small coastal communities.

Carlock and Jung write of the Seaport:

Rising seas threaten to reclaim those old mud flats, and, together with more frequent and severe storms, could swamp the neighborhood that has risen atop them. In all, 99 percent of what’s been built in the Seaport in the last quarter-century is at risk of flooding by 2050, according to a recent analysis from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.

I want to call your attention to an interactive map put together by Jung and John Hancock that’s based on data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which the Trump regime has been busily wrecking. You can enter any address and see what the risks are. It turns out that we’re far enough uphill from the Mystic Lakes that we have little to worry about, but that’s not true of our neighbors closer to the shore.

The digital presentation of the entire series is outstanding.

“The Harvard Plan, Season 2,” by Ilya Marritz. I do not share the Globe’s obsession with all things Harvard. But I listened to Season 1 on the fall of former Harvard president Claudine Gay and got more out of it than I had expected. Over the weekend I caught the first episode of Season 2, which deals with the Trump regime’s assault on Harvard and other universities. As someone who works for a large university, I couldn’t help but be enthralled.

The podcast is a collaboration between the Globe and the public radio program “On the Media,” and it’s free. I was especially taken with Kit Parker, a bioengineering and physics professor, Army officer and self-described conservative Trump supporter. Parker is in favor of Trump’s crusade. At one point he says:

We’re unable to complete our mission by hosting debate and thoughtful discussion about the issues of the day represented by both sides. We continue to lower standards for admissions and scholarship, and integrity of scholarship.

We had spent 10 years talking about diversity, equity, inclusion, while we were aggressively excluding or silencing conservative voices on campus. Harvard should be like an intellectual cage match.

Of course, there are also more liberal faculty members who express horror at what Trump is doing as well as ambivalence over how Harvard should respond.

If you live in the Boston area and you’re reading this blog, then you’re probably already a Globe subscriber. But as I’ve said before, I wish they’d offer a few gift links per month, and I think it would result in more paid subscribers.

How a 2016 ruling defined the issues in climate scientist Michael Mann’s libel suit

Michael Mann. Photo (cc) 2020 by Oregon State University.

Media coverage of climate scientist Michael Mann’s victory in a libel case against two right-wing commentators might lead you to believe he won at least in part because those commentators, Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn, compared him to a convicted child molester. For instance, here’s The Washington Post’s lead:

Michael Mann, a prominent climate scientist, won his long-standing legal battle against two right-wing bloggers who claimed that he manipulated data in his research and compared him to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky, a major victory for the outspoken researcher.

And here’s a paragraph from The New York Times’ account:

In 2012, Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn drew parallels between controversy over Dr. Mann’s research and the scandal around Jerry Sandusky, the former football coach at Pennsylvania State University who was convicted of sexually assaulting children. Dr. Mann was a professor at Penn State at the time.

I was alarmed because the statement at the heart of the Sandusky comparison, written by Simberg in a blog post for the Competitive Enterprise Institute and repeated by Steyn (with reservations) in National Review, speaks of Mann’s alleged “abuse” of data, comparing him to Sandusky only tangentially. Here’s what Simberg wrote:

Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.

This is pretty rough stuff; even Steyn writes, “Not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr Simberg does.” But it does not actually compare Mann to a child molester. I was taken aback when I read accounts of the verdict because, on the face of it, it didn’t strike me as libelous to reach for an admittedly horrendous metaphor in describing what you regard as someone’s scientific misconduct.

Fortunately, I discovered that a 2016 ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which allowed Mann’s suit to move forward, made clear that the case hinged on a straightforward distinction between assertions labeled as fact versus opinion. (Both the Simberg and Steyn pieces are reproduced in full in that ruling.) In that regard, Thursday’s verdict did no damage to the protections that the press enjoys against meritless libel suits. Continue reading “How a 2016 ruling defined the issues in climate scientist Michael Mann’s libel suit”

Candidates gang up on Ramaswamy because they just can’t stand his smug arrogance

Vivek Ramaswamy. Photo (cc) 2022 by Gage Skidmore.

Entertainment was hard to come by at Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate. But to the extent that there was anything to savor, it came in the form of the attacks on Vivek Ramaswamy at the hands of Mike Pence, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie. What they needed to accomplish was to bury what was left of Ron DeSantis. Instead, they were so enraged by Ramaswamy that they focused their fire on him.

Ramaswamy was glib, smug, rude and arrogant. He also mouthed far-right talking points in a way that would do Donald Trump proud, coming out foursquare for everything bad, from coal to Russia. Although all eight candidates tried to duck a question about climate change (Haley was a wishy-washy exception), only Ramaswamy declared it to be a “hoax.” He alone would cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine, though DeSantis was heading in that direction.

Did Ramaswamy help or hurt himself? Who knows? I thought New York Times columnist David French put it well: “Everything I dislike about him, MAGA loves, and he looked more like Trump’s heir than DeSantis did.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called Ramaswamy a “cocky little shit,” which wasn’t quite accurate: he’s actually pretty tall.

In case Ramaswamy is new to you, you might want to check out this profile in The New Yorker, written by Sheelah Kolhatkar. Ramaswamy, who made his fortune in biotech, has moved to the extreme right in recent years, something that hasn’t exactly endeared him to those who were once close to him. Kolhatkar writes:

I asked Ramaswamy if his burgeoning reputation as a conservative firebrand had taken a personal toll. He chose his words carefully. A family member no longer spoke to him, and he’d been ghosted by a close friend. Although he’d forged new relationships with conservatives, none of the connections had turned into friendships. “I feel like the public advocacy, or whatever you call what I’ve been doing in the last couple of years, has eroded more friendships than new friendships made up for it,” he said.

Being shunned because of your principles is one thing. Being shunned because of ambition is something else.

So who won? I thought the big winner was President Biden. Trump, too, I imagine, since he continues to dominate the Republican field and did not take part in Wednesday’s free-for-all. Other than that, I’d say Pence was the winner, sort of; he managed to get credit for standing up to Trump on Jan. 6 without being booed too loudly, as Chris Christie was, and he came across as a normal candidate — that is, if your idea of normal is an extremist who wants a nationwide ban on abortion. Another Times columnist, Ross Douthat, said of Pence’s performance: “Moral clarity, debating chops, a message frozen in amber in 1985 and a visceral hatred for Vivek Ramaswamy: It won’t get him the nomination but it made for some of the better theater of the night.” James Pindell of The Boston Globe gave Pence an A-plus.

A lot of people thought Haley did well, too. She projected as independent and even somewhat moderate, criticizing Trump for running up the debt. You’d think might hurt her chances of being chosen as Trump’s running mate, but she’s proven over and over that she’ll be whatever she thinks she needs to be.

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Former Murdoch lieutenant states the obvious: Fox News is toxic and dangerous

Rupert Murdoch. 2011 photo in the public domain by David Shankbone.

What’s interesting about Preston Padden’s unburdening of himself with regard to Rupert Murdoch and Fox News isn’t in what he says. It’s that he said anything at all.

Padden, a former high-ranking executive in the Murdoch empire, wrote a commentary for The Daily Beast earlier this week in which he lamented the Fox News Channel’s devolution from “a responsible and truthful center-right news network” into what it is today: a propaganda arm of Trump Republicans who promote the Big Lie about the 2020 election, peddle deadly falsehoods about COVID-19, and stir up racial animosity by fear-mongering about Black Lives Matter and Antifa. (He should have mentioned climate change while he was at it.) Padden writes:

Over the past nine months I have tried, with increasing bluntness, to get Rupert to understand the real damage that Fox News is doing to America. I failed, and it was arrogant and naïve to ever have thought that I could succeed.

No kidding. Now, it’s true that Fox News wasn’t quite the toxic cesspool that it has become in the age of Trump. Prime-time talk-show hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Greta Van Susteren were reasonable and dealt for the most part with facts. Sean Hannity was paired with a liberal, the late Alan Colmes.

If you squinted, you could make a case that Fox was a right-wing version of what the liberal network MSNBC is today. But I don’t know that it was ever “a responsible and truthful center-right news network”; more like a hard-right outlet whose most outlandish outbursts were at least grounded in some semblance of truth.

Now, though, it’s nothing but lies, racism and conspiracy theories, especially during prime time, led by onetime rational thinker-turned-white supremacist Tucker Carlson. Padden attribute this to Murdoch’s “deep-seated vein of anti-establishment/contrarian thinking,” but he’s giving Rupe way too much credit. It’s money and ratings, and nothing more. That’s all it’s ever been.

The Globe will expand its coverage of climate change

The Boston Globe is in the process of creating a four-person team to cover climate change, according to an email to the staff from Steven Wilmsen, the paper’s narrative editor. A trusted source forwarded it to me a little while ago.

One of those people is a new hire — Sabrina Shankman, who’s coming over from Inside Climate News, for whom she covered the Arctic. She’ll be joined by longtime environmental reporter David Abel and Janelle Nanos, who apparently will be part-time, as she’ll continue covering retail as well. Rounding out the team will be a digital producer who has yet to be hired. Wilmsen writes:

It’s important to note that as you read this — and even as we reported seismic, world-changing matters over the last 18-months — the planet’s health continued on a dangerous path. Last year was the hottest on record. The urgency for dramatic action has never been greater. The Globe’s goal is to bring that urgency to our readers — and to reduce the scale of an overwhelmingly large problem to the community and regional level. We aim to shine light on the hurdles and inequities our region faces as we strive for zero emissions, show pathways toward solutions, and, perhaps most importantly, hold leaders who are responsible for getting us there to account. That’s a big and exciting job that ultimately must engage many others in the newsroom, especially reporters on key beats. We’ll be reaching out in the weeks and months ahead.

In the current newspaper environment, it is impossible to take note of a development like this without stressing — again — how crucial it is to have committed local ownership. Even as John and Linda Henry continue to invest in the Globe (though it’s long past time to settle that union contract), papers elsewhere are being dismantled by the corporate chains and hedge funds that have acquired them.

Anyway, good move. It adds value for Globe subscribers and, needless to say, it’s about an issue of paramount importance.

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How Fox News is helping to destroy the planet

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Want to fight climate change? Tell your elderly relatives to turn off Fox News.

A new survey about global warming by the Pew Research Center provides reasons for optimism. A majority of Americans favors more federal action on environmental issues, including climate change. Most respondents said we should put more emphasis on developing alternative energy sources than on expanding our use of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas.

But there is one huge caveat: older, conservative respondents aren’t inclined to do much of anything — and many of them continue to believe the fiction that climate change has more to do with natural causes than with human activities.

“A strong majority of liberal Democrats (84%) say human activity contributes a great deal to climate change, with near consensus among them that human activity contributes at least some amount to climate change (96%),” according to the survey report. “In contrast, about half of conservative Republicans (53%) say human activity contributes a great deal (14%) or some (39%) to climate change. Another 45% of this group says humans play not too much or no role in climate change.”

Indifference to doing something about climate change, the survey adds, increases with age — the older the respondents, the less likely they are to want the government to take action.

Although Pew doesn’t say it, these findings coincide perfectly with the demographics of Fox News, which caters to older, conservative viewers. Cable news viewers in general are old — MSNBC, which appeals to liberals, has an even older audience than Fox. But it’s Fox, not MSNBC, that pumps out a steady stream of climate-change denialism and skepticism.

Earlier this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported on findings that showed rejection of climate science among ordinary people is uniquely American — and that Fox News was the likely reason.

Citing survey data, the author, Dana Nuccitelli, wrote that “Republicans who watch Fox News are more than twice as likely to deny human-caused climate change than Republican non-viewers, and 62 percent of Republicans watch Fox News.” Nuccitelli added that the data “suggests that the presence of Fox News and other conservative media outlets may be the primary explanation for why climate denial is more prevalent in the United States than in other developed countries.”

And it’s further proof that Rupert Murdoch, whose family runs Fox News, is one of the most dangerous people on the planet.

Looking for some specifics? In just the past few months, Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity has mocked U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., for linking the severity of Hurricane Dorion to climate change. Another host, Tucker Carlson, referred to the September climate strike as “adults hoping to exploit children for political purposes.” And Laura Ingraham called climate activism by Greta Thunberg and others “globalist” and “socialism in a new mask.”

It sounds ludicrous. But when your Uncle Bert and Aunt Gertrude watch hours upon hours of this stuff, the effect is to produce a combination of anger, cynicism and inertia that makes it nearly impossible to break through with serious ideas about how to save the planet. And let’s not forget that Fox functions as state television for a president who declared on Twitter in 2012 that global warming was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

Nor is there anything new about Fox News viewers believing things that just aren’t true. Last spring, a poll by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal found that solid majorities of respondents who get most of their news from Fox believed that President Trump was telling the truth about the Russia investigation. They also said they weren’t worried about future Russian interference in U.S. elections. Half of Fox News viewers believed that the Mueller report had cleared Trump of wrongdoing — even though Mueller drew a virtual road map for the House to impeach Trump on charges that he obstructed the investigation.

Then again, you could go back to the early days of the war in Iraq, when 67% of Fox News viewers believed the falsehood promoted by the Bush-Cheney administration that Saddam Hussein had worked closely with Al Qaeda.

Despite overwhelming scientific consensus that time is running out to avoid the worst effects of climate change, the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to rise. As one of the two worst polluters (China is the other), the United States has to lead if anything is going to be accomplished. Unfortunately, Trump’s response has been to pull out of the Paris climate-change accords and to torment California for taking action at the state level.

The role of Fox News in preventing serious action on climate change shouldn’t be underestimated. From propping up the Trump presidency to mocking science as a bastion of liberal elitism, Fox is hastening the day when parts of the planet will become uninhabitable.

The Pew survey shows that a majority of Americans wants to do something serious about climate change. It also shows that the same Foxified minority keeping Trump in office is blocking the wishes of the majority. It’s further proof that our media system, like our electoral system, is undermining our democracy.

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Why the midterms could be disastrous for the planet

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Monday’s broadcast of “The CBS Evening News” began on a portentous note. “Good evening,” said anchor Scott Pelley. “Melting glaciers, rising sea levels, higher temperatures. If you think someone’s trying to tell us something, someone just did.”

Pelley’s introduction was followed by a report on the latest study by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. According to The Washington Post, the panel found that global warming is now “irreversible,” and that drastic steps must be taken to reduce the use of fossil fuels in order to prevent worst-case scenarios from becoming a reality.

No matter. Before the night was over, Americans had turned their backs on the planet. By handing over the Senate to Mitch McConnell and his merry band of Republicans, voters all but ensured that no progress will be made on climate change during the next two years — and that even some tenuous steps in the right direction may be reversed.

At Vox, Brad Plumer noted that Tuesday’s Alfred E. Neuman moment came about despite more than $80 million in campaign spending by environmentalists and despite natural disasters that may be related to climate change, such as the unusual destructiveness of Hurricane Sandy and the ongoing drought in the West.

“Which means that if anything’s going to change, it may have to happen outside Congress,” Plumer wrote, adding that “the 2014 election made clear that Washington, at least, isn’t going to be much help on climate policy anytime soon.”

Not much help? That would be the optimistic view. Because as Elana Schor pointed out in Politico, Republicans and conservative Democrats may now have a veto-proof majority to move ahead on the Keystone XL pipeline. The project, which would bring vast quantities of dirty oil from Canada into the United States, would amount to “the equivalent of adding six million new cars to the road,” the environmentalist Bill McKibben said in an interview with “Democracy Now” earlier this year.

The problem is that though Americans say they care about climate change, they don’t care about it very much.

In September, the Pew Research Center reported the results of a poll that showed 61 percent of the public believed there is solid evidence that the earth has been warming, and that 48 percent rated climate change as “a major threat” — well behind the Islamic State and nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea.

Moreover, whereas Democrats registered 79 percent on “solid evidence” and 68 percent on “major threat,” Republicans scored just 37 percent and 25 percent. The Republican political leadership, anxious to keep its restive right-wing base happy, has every incentive to keep pursuing its science-bashing obstructionist path.

One possible solution to this mess was proposed in the New York Times a few days ago by David Schanzer and Jay Sullivan of Duke University: get rid of the midterm elections altogether by extending the terms of representatives from two to four years and by changing senatorial terms from six years to four or eight.

As Schanzer and Sullivan noted, presidential election years are marked by high turnout across a broad spectrum of the electorate. By contrast, the midterms attract a smaller, whiter, older, more conservative cohort that is bent on revenge for the setbacks it suffered two years earlier. (According to NBC News, turnout among those 60 and older Tuesday was 37 percent, compared to just 12 percent for those under 30.)

“The realities of the modern election cycle,” they wrote, “are that we spend almost two years selecting a president with a well-developed agenda, but then, less than two years after the inauguration, the midterm election cripples that same president’s ability to advance that agenda.”

There is, of course, virtually no chance of such common-sense reform happening as long as one of our two major parties benefits from it not happening.

The consequences of that inaction can be devastating. According to The Washington Post’s account of this week’s U.N. report, “some impacts of climate change will ‘continue for centuries,’ even if all emissions from fossil-fuel burning were to stop.”

Sadly, we just kicked the can down the road for at least another two years.

Correction: This commentary originally said that CBS News’ report on climate change was aired on Tuesday rather than Monday.

Michael Mann, Mark Steyn and the court of public opinion

Mark Steyn is one of my least favorite pundits. But I also don’t like it when people use libel to settle disputes. It seems to me that the climate scientist Michael Mann has the public platform he needs to fight back against Steyn’s smears without having to resort to a lawsuit.

Nevertheless, I think U.S. Judge Frederick Weisberg, who’s presiding over the matter of Mann v. Steyn, probably got it right in deciding that the case can move forward, as Mariah Blake reports for Mother Jones. Ignore the hyperbole over Steyn’s loathsome comparison of Mann to Jerry Sandusky; the key is that Steyn wrote Mann had trafficked in scientifically “fraudulent” data. Steyn claims that’s a matter of opinion, but the question of whether someone committed fraud is something that is either true or not. And if it’s not true, then Steyn may well be found to have libeled Mann. The standard was set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co. (1990).

I should note that Jonathan Adler, writing at The Volokh Conspiracy, believes that Steyn’s statements amount to “hyperbolic expressions of opinion, not statements of fact,” and should therefore be considered protected speech. My response is that it’s a close enough call that a jury should be allowed to decide.

In any event, Steyn has gotten himself into a significant mess with his prose and with his mouth. He’s reportedly had a falling-out with one of his co-defendants, the conservative journal National Review, and he currently lacks legal representation as well. I can’t say I’m sympathetic. This is a guy who once called former senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, “a beneficiary of the medal inflation that tends to accompany unpopular wars.”

But is this how we wish to decide public controversies? In court? There are any number of public forums available to Mann for him to defend himself against Steyn’s accusations, and those forums would probably provide Mann with greater satisfaction than a libel suit that could drag on for years. My advice to Professor Mann: Drop the suit and go on the attack.

Photo via Wikipedia.

Media to president: You’re a liberal!

The state of the union may or may not be strong, but the State of the Union was liberal.

That was the view of media commentators from the left, right and center the morning after President Barack Obama delivered his fourth State of the Union address. The president called for a higher minimum wage, universal preschool and action on gun control and climate change, among other things. And the consensus is that his support for such measures signaled a public embrace of activist government that we’ve rarely seen since the rise of Ronald Reagan more than three decades ago.

Read the rest at the Huffington Post.