CBS News sinks to new low; publishes crackpot global warming story, attributes it to Associated Press, kills it with no retraction

Watts Up With That: CBS News sinks to new low; publishes crackpot global warming story, attributes it to Associated Press, kills it with no retraction

Yesterday I posted a story from CBS News: Quake n’ Bake: Global Warming Causes More Energetic Earthquakes?

The main headline was this: Seismic Activity 5 Times More Energetic Than 20 Years Ago Because Of Global Warming

This drew a lot of attention because of the total lack of verifiable science associated with it. I posted some graphs of USGS data showing that the opposite was true, that recent earthquake energy was actually less that in the early 1900’s, and several commenters pointed out that the source of the story, a Dr. Tom Chalko, has some less than stellar associations with what I would describe as “new age” mysticism, …

…So with that sort of science background available on the web for anyone to see in a few seconds of searching, one wonders how CBS News was duped into running a story like this without even bothering to check into the author. This makes the “historic” Microsoft Word documents used by Dan Rather to discredit President Bush’s National Guard Service look like a peer reviewed science paper.

The story gets weirder. CBS attributed the story on their website to the Associated Press (AP) and you can see that clearly in the screen capture of the story below. Odd thing though, there is no byline, no story author as you usually see with an AP story: …

…Here is where it gets interesting, after CBS pulled the story from their website, I did some searches for it on the Associated Press website at www.ap.org thinking it would still be there.

The story is not found in searches at www.ap.org using “Tom Chalko”  or “earthquake global warming” …

…So from the four different angles, Google, my local radio station newsroon, my local newspaper newsroom, and AP itself, it has become clear that this was never an Associated Press story. Yet it is even more clear that CBS falsely attributed the story to AP, and then removed it without so much as a note, much less a retraction….

…It’s one thing to screw up a story, it happens. But it is quite another to falsely attribute the source, and then to remove the story with no notice or retraction or recognition of the error whatsoever.

Accurate science reporting, particularly in stories attributing almost anything to “global warming” in the mainstream media has been woefully inadequate, but this is pure incompetence on the part of CBS.