Los Angeles Times | Guardian
The Los Angeles Times will no longer publish letters from climate change deniers, Times letters editor Paul Thornton wrote earlier this month.
“Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published,” Thornton wrote. “Saying ‘there’s no sign humans have caused climate change’ is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.”
“Thornton’s decision could well leave a few editors wondering if they should follow suit,” Graham Readfearn writes in the Guardian.
Elaine McKewon, the author of an Australian study of newspaper coverage of climate change, told Readfern she hoped the Times’ decision would give “other mainstream media outlets the courage to stop appeasing the climate denial noise machine.”
In the scientific community, the debate about anthropogenic global warming has been over for decades. The scientific consensus on climate change is as strong as the consensus on human evolution or the link between smoking and cancer.
The L.A. Times has apparently made no similar choices on online comments — Thornton’s piece is followed by hundreds of them, many of which are by people who don’t believe that humans cause climate change.
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