Snapped Shot

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research’s bird-dogging of Gore’s energy hypocrisy sheds light on another scandal: The corruption of media environmental coverage.

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Drudge picked up the story and it spread like wildfire across the Internet — and it made waves in journalism circles too. How had a tiny think tank scooped the Nashville Tennessean, one of the country’s storied investigative newspapers, on Tennessee’s most prominent public figure?

With egg on his face, Tennessean editor Mark Silverman admitted that his paper had possessed the information for months but not published it. “We got occupied by other stories,” Silverman lamely explained. The paper, in other words, claimed not to think it a priority to report that the world’s most prominent green politician — a Tennessean who had called global warming a “moral threat” and a “planetary emergency” — was, in fact, an energy hog. For perspective, would the paper have put on the backburner a story that, say, another former Tennessee senator — pro-life advocate Fred Thompson — and his wife had aborted a child?

In fact, Silverman is a known Democratic partisan with a reputation for protecting Democratic pols. As news editor for my paper, the Detroit News, before he took the Tennessean job, Silverman consistently ran defense for state Democratic politicians as well as deflecting major stories that countered the party’s environmental and health-care agendas.

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