President Clinton is intent on using television to pitch his support for a United Nations treaty to curb global warming. This week, he invited 100 TV weather forecasters to the White House hoping they'd propagandize local viewers on behalf of his crusade. Meanwhile, it appears that some other backers of the treaty don't want to allow its opponents to contradict them on TV. Take CNN. After running two ads skeptical of the treaty for three weeks, CNN has ordered them off the air. The cable-news network says it doesn't want them running while they do extended coverage of the issue.
The ads are, or were, being run by the Global Climate Information Project, a coalition of business, labor and consumer groups who think the climate treaty would force the U.S. to cut energy use by 20% while countries such as China, India and Mexico are exempt. Project members include groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers that you might expect to oppose the treaty. But it also includes the National Black Chamber of Commerce, the Small Business Survival Committee, the Seniors Coalition and the United Mine Workers and the AFL-CIO.
The Project's ads lay out the case that higher energy costs imposed by the treaty will raise prices for U.S. consumers while citizens of countries "responsible for almost half the world's emissions won't have to cut back." The ads began running on CNN and many radio stations September 10.
Ben Goddard, an executive with the First Tuesday group that prepared the ads, says he got a call from a CNN executive yesterday morning. He was told the ads were being taken off the air. When Mr. Goddard inquired, he was later told that the decision had been made by Tom Johnson, CNN's chairman, and CNN founder Ted Turner, now a vice chairman of the parent company Time-Warner.
To its credit, CNN, unlike other networks, does accept "issue advocacy" ads of this type. But as CNN spokesman Steve Haworth explained, it has a policy of pulling such ads "during periods of intense media coverage of the subject matter." He argues that inattentive viewers might confuse the ads with the news coverage and vice versa. Mr. Haworth says the decision was made after a "coincidental" complaint alleging the ads were inaccurate was filed by the pro-treaty Environmental Information Center. CNN executives didn't rule on the Center's complaint, but decided to pull the ads because CNN's coverage of the treaty was being stepped up. Mr. Haworth says he "doesn't know" if Mr. Turner participated in the decision.
Mr. Haworth could come up with only two other examples when CNN invoked what he admitted was its "subjective" policy. It didn't pull ads at the height of the debates over NAFTA, health care reform and tort reform.
Let's see if we get the logic here: Insofar as CNN decided not to offer live coverage of the Thompson campaign finance hearings, it presumably would accept "issues" ads promoting their importance to the public.
CNN of course has a right to carry or not carry any ads it wishes. But its sudden reversal on the anti-climate treaty ads smacks of, well, an overheated response. Treaty supporters tend to become apoplectic at anyone who dares suggest that the threat of global warming is theory, not established fact. Last July, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt lost it when he claimed that "oil companies and the coal companies in the U.S. have joined in a conspiracy to hire pseudo scientists to deny the facts." He went on to say that "what they are doing is un-American in the most basic sense."
By pulling the plug on a responsible point of view in a public debate, CNN is circumscribing give-and-take over an international treaty of direct consequence to every American. Given that media coverage is already tilted toward global warming doomsayers, the public will be less informed as a result. Ted Turner may now have become the world's number one supporter of the United Nations, but when it comes to citizens of the United States he apparently would just as soon they not hear arguments against the U.N.'s pet treaty.
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