April 25, 1996.

*****

New Yorker abuse?

Over the years I had great fun picking on the New Yorker for its liberal politics, its Manhattan worldview that could not see Flyover Country or its people and its snooty, screw-the reader attitude.

Though famed for its vaunted fact-checking process and great writing, I caught it in a few silly mistakes, including this whopper about a speeding glacier in Greenland. When its great climate change warrior Elizabeth Kolbert came to town to give a lecture, I gently ambushed her. And just last week the NY-er’s mega story on what interesting and arguably good things are happening in Steubenville, Ohio, blew it by never mentioning its most favorite son, Dean Martin.

April 12, 1990

Feb. 1, 2001

Chicken Little is not only alive, he’s still hysterical and apparently editing U.S. News & World Report.

How else can you explain this week’s cover story, ‘Scary Weather: Global Warming Is Real, It’s Already Screwing Up the Earth’s Weather Big-time and We’re All Going to Die Miserably in a Series of Biblical Plagues Unless Piggish America Wises Up and Stops Mutilating the Biosphere.’

OK, that’s not an exact rendition of U.S. News’ cover line. But it pretty much sums up the point of view that America’s No. 3 newsweekly pushes in its wildly unbalanced exercise in all-out sky-is-fallingism.

Global warming is a tricky, contentious issue — a complicated mix of not-always-certain science, sometimes ugly anti-Western politics and wacky faith-based environmentalism.

As U.S. News says, all but the most knuckle-headed ideologues and super-skeptical scientists now believe that Earth’s average temperature already is rising.

But how high will those temperatures go? What effect will a hotter Earth have on things like severe-weather episodes and ocean levels? And is global warming man-made, Earth-made or even Sun-made?

Not even Al Gore knows this stuff. Yet U.S. News’ seven-page fright package exudes an annoying amount of scientific certainty it is not entitled to.

This is mainly because ‘Scary Weather’ is based almost entirely on a long-range forecast by a panel of 600 United Nations scientists, who not only declare global warming is the real deal, it is caused by man.

What’s worse, U.S. News seems to have swallowed the UN’s dismal weather forecast hook, line and computer model.

Kissing off global warming’s doubters/skeptics in one paragraph, U.S. News fixes on the worst-case projected temperature rise (10.4 Fahrenheit degrees) and then lets loose a pack of 21st-century doomsday scenarios on the world.

Drought. Disease. Political upheaval. Death and pestilence. Malnutrition. Wildfires. Rain and flooding. Rising sea levels. Wars over water. Millions of ‘environmental’ refugees.

Too biblically abstract to frighten you? How about malaria in Vermont? Nebraska out of water? Waterlogged hotels in Miami’s South Beach?

To be fair, U.S. News eventually assures us ‘humanity is not helpless.’ Society ‘is more robust’ and humans are more able to adapt than we give it credit for, says an expert brought in for some last-paragraph optimism.

And don’t worry, we bad Americans ‘may not even have to give up all the trappings of a First World lifestyle in order to survive - and prosper.’

New technologies will help. But, the experts warn, we better get out of our big cars, curtail our energy use (way to go, California) and start taxing our beloved gasoline and carbon emissions if we want to atone for our sins.

Even David Gergen, pal of Presidents and U.S. News’ wise editor-at-large, piles on. He scolds America in his back-page editorial for ‘conspicuously failing’ to lead the way ‘in preserving the biosphere.’

Sad to say, U.S. News’ deep green spin on global warming is not the exception, as proven by February’s cover package in World Press Review.

The magazine, which reprints newspaper articles from around the world and has an editor who’s as anti-American as any U.N. bureaucrat, offers a dozen global warming articles in ‘Cold Feet on Global Warming.’

But from the leftist Le Nouvel Observateur in Paris and Independent Bangkok Post to the conservative Press of New Zealand, when it comes to weighing the causes and cures of global warming, the papers are as unbalanced as U.S. News.

Not only is the Arctic ice cap dangerously thinning, says The New Yorker in Part 1 of “The Climate of Man,” its especially biased trilogy on “the realities of global warming.”

But the mile-high glaciers that cover most of Greenland are melting so fast that one of them, the mighty river of ice called Jakobshavn Isbrae, has nearly doubled its speed since 1993.

According to writer Elizabeth Kolbert, who schlepped to Alaska, the Arctic and Greenland to personally observe the thawing permafrost and melting sea ice, by 2003 the velocity of this speedy glacier “had increased to 7.8 miles per hour” from its 1993 flow-rate of “three and a half miles per hour.”

And you always thought glacial meant slow.

At that Boston Marathon-competitive speed — nearly 8 miles per hour, 192 miles a day, 6,000 miles a month — the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier will be knocking on the door of Rio De Janeiro by Memorial Day.

What Kolbert obviously meant to write in the April 25 issue — and what The New Yorker’s famed fact-checkers wish they had caught — was that the glacier’s speed had jumped to 7.8 miles per year. If you prefer more precise scientific numbers, that’s .00089 miles per hour, or a still-impressive 4.7 feet per hour.

Being off by a factor of 8,760 should in no way detract from the magazine’s five National Magazine Awards.

Nor should it by itself discredit the politically loaded premise Kolbert set out to prove: that global warming is not a liberal hoax; that all serious scientists who are not Bush administration stooges believe it’s a problem worth exchanging our SUVs for bicycles for; and that modern man is the culprit.

Though embarrassing, the speed of the glaciers is a minor mistake in an otherwise perfectly spelled 12,881-word article that deeply detailed permafrost but had no room for an honest paragraph of skepticism about the often-uncertain science behind global warming.

“The Climate of Man II,” this week’s offering, while mercifully shorter, is just as politically unbalanced and more of a stretch: It seeks to show that the discovery that rapid climate change apparently wiped out “large and sophisticated cultures” such as the Mayans and the Old Kingdom of Egypt presents us with “an uncomfortable precedent.”

Who knows how the New Yorker’s exciting serial will end next week? Will Earth melt? And how does Kolbert’s liberal tilt compare with Mother Jones’ current cover-expose of Exxon-Mobil’s generous funding of global warming skeptics?

Stay tuned — and don’t get run down by a glacier.

****

The New Yorker’s Shaky Certitudes

By Bill Steigerwald

It’s always fun to spot an embarrassing mistake in the haughty New Yorker.

But it’s extra enjoyable when the error is made by Elizabeth Kolbert, the liberal-left magazine’s official publicity agent for the Global Warming Apocalypse.

Glaring mistakes like the latest one Kolbert made Jan. 22 are extremely rare. The New Yorker -- winner of so many National Magazine Awards someone should call the Justice Department -- has always striven for perfect accuracy.

In fact, it has a fetish for facts. Its vaunted battery of obsessive fact-checkers, now numbering 16, is legendary in journalism. But The New Yorker isn’t nearly as infallible as it thinks it is. It’s often caught being inaccurate or biased or both.

Just last week, conservative John Podhoretz pointed out on his National Review Online blog that Nicolas Lemann botched two important, easily verifiable facts about the Valerie Plame case in his Jan. 27 “Talk of the Town” item.

More serious is a defamation claim made in a 12-page letter by a Boston law firm on behalf of Chinese mathematician Dr. Shing-Tung Yau in connection with an Aug. 28, 2006, article. It demands a printed apology and alleges “egregious and actionable errors” and “shoddy journalism.”

Speaking of which, crusader Kolbert’s specialty is cranking out openly unfair and unbalanced articles on global warming like her epic “Climate of Man” trilogy in Spring 2005, which included a hilarious boo-boo that forced The New Yorker to do something it really hates -- admit a mistake and run a correction.

As part of her “proof” that the Arctic ice cap was rapidly melting, Kolbert wrote that the speed of a glacier in Greenland “had increased to 7.8 miles per hour” from its 1993 flow-rate of “three and a half miles per hour.”

Kolbert meant 7.8 miles per year, which meant she was only off by a factor of 8,760. Unfortunately, her magazine’s fact-checkers, editors and copy editors apparently were too busy cheering her on to spot her error.

Kolbert’s latest gaffe can be found in her annoyingly critical Jan. 22 profile of Amory Lovins, the famous environmental genius and “natural capitalist” who, unlike Kolbert, prefers practical, pragmatic, market-driven solutions to energy conservation.

After confusingly toting up how many hundreds of billions Americans spend on gas, oil and energy each year, she concluded that “In 2007, total energy expenditures in the U.S. will come to more than a quadrillion dollars, or roughly a tenth of the country’s gross domestic product.”

Quadrillion? Kolbert actually meant “a trillion dollars.” And the annual U.S. GDP is about $13 trillion, not $10 quadrillion, as she implied. This time Kolbert was wrong by only a factor of 1,000.

No magazine -- not even a great one -- is perfect. Mistakes always will be made. Kolbert’s latest laugher is irrelevant compared to the junk journalism she practices in her global-warming propaganda pieces. And her mini-blunders only cause her magazine embarrassment because it foolishly sets itself up as infallible.

The New Yorker can continue to provide Kolbert with a soapbox to issue arrogant certitudes about the scientific causes and cures of global warming. It can produce all the egregiously liberal journalism it wants. It’s still a free country.

But to avoid future ridicule, it might want to hire a few fact-checkers -- or editors -- who know how fast glaciers go, how big the U.S economy is and the difference between a trillion and a quadrillion.

Ambushing a New Yorker star

A couple years later, in 2008, Elizabeth Kolbert came to Pittsburgh to deliver a well-paid lecture on the alleged existential danger posed to Mother Earth from man-made climate change.

As I often did when important speakers like her came to little old Pittsburgh, I went to hear her talk — plus I gently ambushed her afterwards about the lack of fairness and balance in her climatology.

Read more

RIP, SI.

Sports Illustrated — once one of our greatest magazines — is essentially dead and buried.

The ‘cultural touchstone’ was murdered by the usual gang of nasty suspects — the Internet, cultural shifts and the cruel economics of the post-print era.

Here’s some detail from Business Insider.

SI’s highly profitable swimsuit issue was an annual pseudo-sports event that became as important to America's month of February as the idiot-circus surrounding Punxsutawney Phil's shadow.

Shamelessly imitated by its hungrier competitors and assorted other buck-chasing publishers, SI could sell 2 million Swimsuit Issues on newstands every February — to men and women.

SI tried various gimmicks to disguise the fact that it was nakedly exploiting mankind's most inexhaustible resource: beautiful and ably constructed young women posing in the sun or writhing in the turquoise surf of exotic beaches while wearing as little clothing as womanly possible.

The Swimsuit Issue, invented in 1964, was an embarrassing and exhausted idea long before the 2023 Woke Edition appeared with Martha Stewart, 81, on the cover and a few plus-sized beauties inside.

SI described it as being:

packed with 28 incredible women—all of whom were selected not only for their inner and outer beauty, but also for the ways in which they use their voices and platforms for good. Let’s meet them all!

I mocked SI’s Swimsuit Season in my first-ever magazines column for the LA Times in 1987 (see below) and for the next 17 years it often provided me with ‘news’ for my weekly columns in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh Trib.

SI, RIP.

*****

Here’s a sampling of my column that exploited SI’s annual exploitation of beach girls from 1994 and the early 1990s.

Swimsuit Season, 32 years ago

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Feb. 10, 1994

Swimsuit Season, 1990 — but first a plea for ending the drug war.

From 1991 — 40 hot pages of non-sports.

‘Magazine Watch,’ Feb. 6, 1987 — The origin column

Finally, here’s my first ‘Magazine Watch’ column for the Los Angeles Times.

A free-lance effort for which I was paid $250 a week, it ran every Friday in the Times’ View section.

It lasted about six months, was readable and lively and was considered a success — until the little creep who was the editor of the View section decided to kill it one Friday without a word of warning to me.

In what was typically rotten newspaper behavior, ‘Magazine Watch’ was disappeared from the paper without explanation to the LAT’s 1.1 million readers.

The editor — not the same one who had accepted and blessed my column idea — later told me I could continue the column if I wrote it like I was a media reporter covering the business of the magazine industry.

It was a stupid idea that would turn a readable column of interest to anyone into a boring report of interest to no one. Plus, I had a full-time job as a copy editor and there was no way I could find the time to cover magazines the way he wanted.

So, as he apparently hoped, my columnizing career was over — until I got to Pittsburgh, where I’d write almost 800 weekly columns on magazines for the Post-Gazette and Trib until 2007.

Sports Illustrated

Swimsuit Issue, 1987

Sure, there are pieces on the America's Cup, last week's race at Daytona and how tough Big Ten basketball is this year. But real sports guys know what season it really is at Sports Illustrated: swimsuit spectacular time.

It's the usual splash, with a cover and 34 colorful inside pages full of seven models leaping, posing and cavorting in T-back tops arid bikinis and backless lace-up suits.

The sports angle? As dubious as always.

Cover girl Elle Macpherson, a former Aussie back-stroker, looks like she might be standing on a boat. And Kathy Ireland is lying draped in the rough of Teeth of the Dog golf course in Casa de Campa, Dominican Republic, where SI went to shoot its mid-winter tradition.

Everything looks pretty tasteful and tame this year, with no borderline outrageousness that Hef might envy.

Super Bowl leftovers …

In the aftermath of the Super Bowl, on Feb. 11 the LA Times picked up some snippy comments from the Post-Gazette’s Bruce Keidan and my brother John, who was a quotable favorite of the sports guys at the Times. The headline writer wanted to know whom John would have rated higher than Smith and John would have named several who didn’t have the stats but were better runners — that guy named Barry Sanders from Detroit was one. John’s comment rode the LA Times wire service and appeared in dozens of papers around the USA.