Bringing the Heat on Warming

The Heartland Institute website accuses Gore of a "snowjob" on global warming.Chicago Sun-Times Business Editor Dan Miller, who previously used his editorial position to promote the writings of corporate pollution-apologist Steven Milloy, is now lending his name to a bit of global warming skepticism disseminated by the Heartland Institute, a corporate-funded think tank where he used to work. Miller's cover letter accompanies a mailing to journalists in which Heartland public affairs director Tom Swiss trashes Al Gore's documentary about the issue, "An Inconvenient Truth," as an "alarmist or kind of an extreme example" of reporting on the issue, while "The Great Global Warming Swindle," which takes the opposite view, is praised as "a European documentary by Martin Durkin that won a lot of awards." (Evidently Swiss didn't think to mention Gore's awards, which include an Academy Award and the Nobel Prize.) Bob Steele, an ethics scholar at the Poynter Institute for media studies, sees some problems with Miller's eagerness to flack for anti-environmentalist causes. "He is actively urging a particular examination, and I would suggest a point of view, on a substantive public policy issue," Steele said. "He's also pitching it in a problematic way to other journalists, using his journalistic connections in doing so."