The Good, the Bad & the Ugly
ABC’s Stossel finds the upside of outsourcing; ABC credits liberal activist with Pulitzer he never won; Time for a global warming deluge

March 29, 2006

The Good
     “Excuse me for being the garden at your skunk party, but we’re creating more jobs than we’re losing,” ABC’s John Stossel told a skeptical Lou Dobbs in an ABCNews.com exclusive on outsourcing.

     Featuring excerpts of an interview with CNN’s Dobbs and interviews with American businessmen and workers benefiting from outsourcing, the “20/20” co-anchor poked holes in Dobbs’ protectionist talking points. Stossel cited a study showing companies that outsource some jobs to foreign countries grow larger on average than companies that do business strictly in the United States. He featured a woman who found a more personally satisfying job as a secretary after being laid off from a factory job with a clothing company.

The Bad
     Starting off an “in-depth” series on global warming, “World News Tonight” falsely presented a liberal activist and author as a Pulitzer Prize winner.

     “Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ross Gelbspan blames a 15-year misinformation campaign by the oil and coal industry” for the public’s lack of alarm over climate change, ABC’s Geoff Morrell told viewers of his network’s March 26 evening newscast. But Gelbspan never won a Pulitzer. The closest claim the former Boston Globe editor lays to the coveted award is that he edited the work of seven journalists who garnered Pulitzers in 1984 for a series of reports on race relations in Boston.

The Ugly
     “No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth,” Time magazine’s Jeffrey Kluger began his cover story for the April 3 edition. “Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us,” he ominously continued.

     Granting her magazine a license for excluding global warming skeptics, Time’s Missy Adams insisted that the “debate over whether Earth is warming up is over.” Adams added melodramatically that “we’re learning that climate disruptions feed off one another in accelerating spirals of destruction.”

     By far the most one-sided and alarmist media coverage this week, the global warming story package by Kluger, Adams, et al. at Time earns that newsweekly a spot in The Ugly column this week.

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly tracks the best and worst media coverage of business and economics. Readers are invited to submit suggestions or news tips to staff writer Ken Shepherd at kshepherd@mediaresearch.org.