Although many on the left wanted climate change to have a higher profile in the 2016 presidential race, one Washington Post editor claimed the heated campaign “could change the climate debate for the better.”
Washington Post Digital Opinions Editor James Downie repeated a series of climate alarmist claims and complained Hillary Clinton’s stated climate policy isn’t sufficient. But he found a silver lining in the way journalists chose to abandon objectivity this campaign season.
Of course, Downie didn’t put it that way. Instead, he touted CNN’s Dylan Byers assessment of how “the contest has altered political journalism.”
Byers wrote that the “traditional model” of journalism “was thrown out the window in favor of a more aggressive journalism that sought to prioritize accuracy over balance.”
Downie responded to this saying, “More journalists have seen that the sky won’t fall if they treat falsehoods as falsehoods, and climate change is an obvious area to apply this new model.”
He concluded his Nov. 7, opinion column by saying, “The realities of climate change are as much objective truth as the murder or unemployment rates. Regarding them as such will be an early test of whether political journalism has rededicated itself to the facts.”
