Among the top Google News search results today for “climate change” is an op-ed by Los Angeles Times letters editor Paul Thornton titled, “Where have all the climate change deniers gone?” The article mocks climate realists for sending in just a trickle of letters to the Times in response to the new most recent report by United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released last week.
Writes Thornton, “Since the IPCC report was released Monday, our readers have expressed everything from despair to resolve to curb climate change. Letters denying the science still trickle in, but this isn’t anything like 2013.”
The title and body of Thornton’s op-ed argues that the recent lack of letters by climate realists to the Los Angeles Times shows climate realists (“deniers,” as he calls them) are shrinking in number and becoming marginalized. That is a false and unethical narrative.
As Thornton knows, the Los Angeles Times in 2013 made headlines around the nation for announcing a policy where the Times would no longer publish letters from climate realists. See, for example, this October 2013 article published by CBS News, titled “L.A. Times cuts off climate-change deniers.”
Clearly, when you announce that you will no longer publish letters questioning climate alarmism, and then you enforce that policy over the next eight years, you can expect that letters from climate realists will then merely “trickle in.” Asserting that the lack of letters the Times now receives from climate realists is anything other than the result of the Times’ restrictive letters policy is dishonest and unethical, but nothing unexpected from the once-reputable-but-now-largely-irrelevant Los Angeles Times.
