Wall Street Journal Runs Ad Trashing WSJ’s Climate Science Denial - by Joe Romm

Editors at Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ) are about as anti-science they come, but they aren’t anti-money.  So for a few extra Hamiltons more than their usual ad rate, the climate science deniers at the WSJ are running an ad calling them out for their denial.

The Partnership for Responsible Growth (PRG), a bipartisan D.C.-based nonprofit that promotes a price on carbon, says that when they originally approached the Journal to run a 12-part ad series, the paper rejected this first ad criticizing the Journal itself.  The Washington Post reports, “Journal spokesperson Colleen Schwartz denied that the paper initially rejected the first ad.”

In any case, the Journal ultimately agreed to run all the ads, but charged PRG $36,528 for this first ad, and only $27,309 apiece for the next eight ads.  The Journal threw in the last three ads for free. Because.

The ad points out, “If the CEO of the world’s largest oil company accepts the basic physics that humans are heating the climate with excess CO2, why won’t the editorial board of this newspaper?  Isn’t it about time?”

The source for the WSJ critique is a new study by Climate Nexus, “How The Wall Street Journal Opinion Section Presents Climate Change,” which concludes:

An analysis of 20 years of the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages on climate shows a consistent pattern that overwhelmingly ignores the science, champions doubt and denial of both the science and effectiveness of action, and leaves readers misinformed about the consensus of science and of the risks of the threat.

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