Associated Press Loves Liberal Causes Like Global Warming

Impoverished local newspapers must cut-and-paste from companies like Associated Press to offer anything beyond hometown gossip.  But AP is just as liberally biased as the national news on television.

       Yesterday’s banner from Washington reads “Studies: Wildfires worse due to global warming”  and  begins with “The devastating wildfires scorching Southern California offer a glimpse of a warmer and more fiery future, according to scientists and federal and international reports.”  What is never mentioned is that the Southwest and Southern California in particular are, by nature, a desert.

       Drought, parched conditions, and wildfires are part and parcel of the Southern California landscape–that is, if water from the Colorado River weren’t artificially channeled-in to create a false sense of tropical lushness.  Richard Henry Dana visited California in the mid-1830s when it was still Mexican territory.  His book Two Years Before the Mast (1840) describes visits to major cities like Los Angeles and San Diego when they were more like villages: “The next morning we found ourselves at anchor in the Bay of San Pedro. Here was this hated, this thoroughly detested spot” where the “plain is almost treeless, with no grass, at least none now in the drought of midsummer, and is filled with squirrel-holes, and alive with squirrels.”

       Similarly, Carey McWilliams in his study Southern California: An Island on the Land also says that “Basically the region is a paradox:  A desert that faces an ocean. Since it is a desert or semi-desert country, maximum sunshine prevails most of the year”:

      Toward the end of the long summer, when the unirrigated sections of the land are a gray, sun-baked tan, one can see , as James M. Cain has observed, that “the naked earth show through everything that grows on it.”  It is then that one notices the sparseness of leafage in relation to the land.  The earth is naked and exposed in Southern California.  It is like the skin of a sun-tanned body with the few indigenous trees standing out sharply, like the hairs on the body, and not, as in other areas, like the thick mat of hair on the head.  There is no carpet on the earth.  Everywhere exposed, the earth is brown and gray and only seldom green.  Today the appearance of the region is deceitful and illusory, for essentially it is a barren, a semi-arid land.

      Of course, the Associated Press follows the progressive’s reliance on deductive reasoning.  They begin with the assumed, but unearned conclusion that global warming is the cause of wildfires in Southern California.  All else follows.  They love to cite “scientists and federal and international reports,” none of which are ever checked out by readers, but which cow them into mindless acceptance.  Indeed, it goes without saying that the scientists and report writers make their livings on promulgating the global warming problem.  Plenty of government money to fund yet more studies and research.  They need to eat too, don’t they?  Ditto for the Associated Press.