PBS Glossed Over Pro-Life March, But Hyped Climate Change Rally

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Feb 20, 2013   |   12:23PM   |   Washington, DC

On January 25, the PBS NewsHour gave the annual “March for Life” a perfunctory 56-word news brief. But on Monday night, the leftist protests against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Canada drew a full story about nine times that long.

Anchor Judy Woodruff somehow ignored the large crowds of Earth Day 1970, Earth Day 1990 (stood there myself), and Earth Day 2000 to echo the Left: “Thousands of people marched on the National Mall in Washington yesterday, braving a cold winter wind to take part in what organizers called the biggest climate rally in U.S. history.” If that wasn’t weird enough, protest organizer Bill McKibben announced the Arctic melted last year:

McKIBBEN: The president needs to think about what his legacy is going to be. Fifty years from now, no one is going to care about the fiscal cliff. They’re going to ask, the Arctic melted in 2012, and then what did you do? And this is the chance to do the right thing.

This would not earn PBS any awards for journalistic excellence, relaying that “the Arctic melted in 2012″ – or perhaps, with today’s politicized award judges, maybe it would. PBS then had a fairly balanced debate between energy lobbyist Scott Segal and green activist Bob Deans of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who insisted the “climate chaos” is murdering Americans:

DEANS: Judy, we just finished the hottest year on round in this country. We lost 50 percent of our corn across the heartland, 60 percent of our pasture lands. We had ranchers liquidating their herds from the Rocky Mountains to the Ohio River Valley because they couldn’t afford to feed their cattle anymore.

We lost 130 Americans.We did $80 billion dollars worth of damage just from Hurricane Sandy. We have a crisis. This climate chaos needs to end.

Woodruff did not explain to PBS viewers that this liberal fire-breather Deans used to be a reporter for Cox Newspapers and the president of the White House Correspondents Association. As Brent Bozell wrote after the last press conference before the Iraq War in 2003:

CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!

 

Bob Deans of Cox Newspapers even bizarrely suggested that the Vietnam War was somehow unjustified because “The regime is still there in Hanoi, and it hasn’t harmed or threatened a single American in the 30 years since the war ended.” Liberals cannot seriously claim these questions didn’t echo their speeches.

LifeNews.com Note: Tim Graham is the director of media analysis for the Media Research Center, a media watchdog group. He was a White House correspondent for World magazine in 2001 and 2002. The following originally appeared on the NewsBusters web site.