Con job at The Weather Channel
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Posted: January 5, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern
This week Americans observed a national day of mourning (I'm speaking not of President Ford's funeral, but rather the day that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi seized power in Congress).
Far-left political ideologies are being promulgated through ever-increasing mediums, and recently I noticed that a once-vaunted American television network, The Weather Channel, had succumbed to the cancerous spread of liberalism.
The Weather Channel debuted in 1982 and went on to earn a reputation as a well-known and respected cable network. The explosive success of the cable channel prompted the publication of a book marking the network's 20th anniversary. That success has been based on the fact that weather forecasts are sought after by a vast number of Americans on a near-daily basis.
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What had been nice about The Weather Channel is that through most of its history it stayed clear of political propaganda and focused on delivering weather forecasts to the nation, supplemented with riveting live reports from the front lines of hurricanes, winter blizzards and springtime floods.
But no more. The Weather Channel is now engaged in a con job on the American people, attempting to scare the public that their actions are destroying the planet by creating a global warming crisis.
The move away from scientific forecasting of the weather to sensationalized leftist political advocacy is in part due to the influence of Wonya Lucas, executive vice president and general manager of The Weather Channel Networks.
Lucas admitted in a recent interview with Media Village that the reprogramming of The Weather Channel was influenced by her tenure at CNN when that network shifted from presenting straight news to personality-driven programming.
Lucas decided that what was good for CNN was good for The Weather Channel, and the objectivity and respectability of the network has now been thrown out the window. It doesn't matter that CNN's turn to the left has caused their ratings to plummet; The Weather Channel's embraced its model.
Media Village reported that the move by The Weather Channel "is intended to establish a broader perspective on the weather category and, says Lucas, to move the brand from functional to emotional."
Emotional weather forecasting?
The Weather Channel is launching a new website and broadband channel dedicated solely to global warming called "One Degree" and has a weekly program called "The Climate Code," devoted almost entirely to liberal advocacy on climate matters.
The network is running advertisements showcasing scared and confused Americans, including children and senior citizens, wondering about the coming apocalypse caused by global warming. (You can view the ad for yourself here.)
The chief martyr for the new "emotional" approach to broadcasting at The Weather Channel is Dr. Heidi Cullen, who serves as the network's cheerleader for global warming hysteria. Cullen's supposed expertise on climatology includes, among other things, earning a bachelor's degree in Near Eastern religions and history from Juniata College. One must indeed have to believe in the mystical to accept anything Ms. Cullen has to say about climatology.
Writing for the One Degree blog, Ms. Cullen recently threw a hissy fit that some meteorologists are openly questioning the conclusions drawn by the Greenpeace crowd about the nature, extent, causes and even existence of global warming.
Cullen's diatribe, titled "Junk Controversy Not Junk Science," called on the American Meteorological Society to start requiring all meteorologists to toe the line on liberal interpretation of global warming, or else lose the organization's certification.
George Orwell's 1984 couldn't have concocted a better form of thought control.
The global warming crowd, led by arrogant hustlers such as Heidi Cullen at The Weather Channel, has set up a no-lose situation for themselves.
Climatology is by definition the study of long-term climate trends, and it will indeed be many decades or longer before any definitive conclusions about even the existence of global warming – let alone its causes – can be determined to be true or false. This means that Cullen and her cohorts can't be held accountable for their erroneous beliefs.
Even still, we can see how foolish it is to allow people like Heidi Cullen to influence decision-makers to impose further restrictions and regulations on the actions of human beings. Global warming scaremongers jumped on the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the busy 2005 Atlantic hurricane season and went on to predict that 2006 would be a potentially devastating year of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean.
As it was, not one single hurricane made landfall in the U.S.
If forecasters can't reliably tell us what will happen in two to three months from now, why would anyone trust that they know what will happen with the weather in 50 or 100 years from now and let them tell us how to live our lives accordingly?
This is all about Big Brother do-gooders trying to control how you live your life, and stripping away the freedoms and liberties of people to live their lives as they see fit, engage in commerce and raise their families.
There's a con job going on at The Weather Channel, and it's time that viewers let the network know it's time to stop the liberal politicization of weather reporting.
You can contact The Weather Channel's vice president of public relations, Kathy Lane, at klane@weather.com to let her know what you think about the new direction of The Weather Channel and voice your opinion.
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