5 Hard Left Issues Where Journalists Show Their Love for Pope Francis

4. Media Embrace Pope Francis When he Embraces Climate Alarmism Liberal media outlets including the three broadcast networks raced to cover the Pope’s encyclical about climate change, seizing on a leaked copy before Laudato Si’ was officially released. After the release, all three networks repeated his complaint that the Earth is becoming an “immense pile of filth” and what they referred to as his call for a “revolution on climate change,” because it fit their climate alarmist agenda.   The Washington Post praised Pope Francis on its June 15 front page, suggesting he could impact environmental policy through his “highly anticipated” encyclical and with his “enormous popularity.” On TV, CBS Evening News reported that “Pope Francis demanded immediate action to reverse climate change, which he blamed on fossil fuels and big business,” June 18. Then they turned to a Catholic farmer using windmills who was “grateful he and the pope are on the same side” of the climate issue. CBS included very little criticism of the climate alarmist encyclical. The New York Times also eagerly covered the encyclical from multiple angles. Laurie Goodstein’s front page article, saying that in spite of criticism from “industrialists, politicians” and others “Francis is following in the footsteps of popes and bishops who, for generations, have written documents on pressing social problems by applying religious teaching to events so contemporary that they seem ripped from their eras’ headlines.” The article even favorably cited the Old Testament to promote the pope’s encyclical. In another Times’ story, Davenport touted it as taking aim at “global capitalism,” and another activist reporter Justin Gillis claimed the encyclical “hews closely to science on climate.” Following the release of Laudato Si’ The Guardian reported that the Vatican had added pro-Occupy Wall Street activist and anti-capitalism Naomi Klein to their list of people for an upcoming environmental conference about implementation of the encyclical. However, the encyclical was also criticized, even if the liberal news media ignored those critics. Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute wrote in The National Review that it had a “shallow understanding of global energy use and, in particular, of how energy consumption is soaring among the people he claims to care most about: the poor.” Bryce argued that if climate change is a threat, countries must get “richer’ to be prepared. Others dispute that climate change is the catastrophic threat the news media claim it is. “In terms of environmental degradation, Laudato Si’ appears oblivious to the fact that the twentieth century’s worst economically driven pollution occurred as a result of centrally-planned state-industrialization schemes in former Communist nations,” Samuel Gregg wrote at American Spectator. “Anyone who’s visited Eastern Europe or the former USSR and witnessed the often-devastated landscape will quickly attest to the validity of that insight.” – See more at: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/business/julia-seymour/2015/09/21/5-hard-left-issues-where-journalists-show-their-love-pope#sthash.tRkPgtTQ.dpuf