Topic: NewsBusters
NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard carried his misinformation campaign against Al Gore to Dennis Miller's radio show, repeating the claim that a British court found "nine material scientific falsehoods" in the Al Gore film "An Inconvenient Truth" without mentioning that the court also found that “four main scientific hypotheses" in the film are "very well supported by research published in respected, peer-reviewed journals and accords with the latest conclusions of the IPCC” or that one of the alleged "falsehoods" is a false conflation of two unrelated statistics. Sheppard also claimed without evidence that Gore's only motivation for making the movie was to cash in on Hurricane Katrina -- a longtime Sheppard smear against Gore -- which even Miller was compelled to correct.
From the Oct. 12 edition of Miller's show:
MILLER: I like what they're doing in the UK. Tell me a little about -- they're running the film "Incovenient Truth" in the UK now, though -- but I love their civility here. They're demanding what?
SHEPPARD: Yeah, basically now what this judge has determined -- and of course, you have to love the delicious hypocrisy of a British judge on Wednesday declaring this film to have nine material scientific falsehoods, and two days later the Nobel committee giving him an award for the film. I mean, you really can't make that up. You couldn't -- there isn't a writer in Hollywood that could write a better script.
MILLER: It is tasty, isn't it?
SHEPPARD: It's delicious. It's absolutely -- I woke up this morning, Dennis, and certainly we expected that he was going to win this, but a part of me when I went to bed last night thought there has to be some sanity in the world, and I wake up this morning and turn on Fox News and there it is, and I thought I was still asleep and having a nightmare. This is shockingly silly.
[...]
My contention here -- one of the things that I find remarkable about one of the falsehoods is the connection between Hurricane Katrina and global warming. And it's my belief -- and I've been writing articles about this for quite some time -- that what really got global warming on the alarmists' radar is indeed Hurricane Katrina and this vision of thousands of New Orleanians, you know, in the water and, you know, at the Superdome and etc., etc., etc. And along comes Al Gore -- and frankly, we have to give him a lot of credit, I think what he did was brilliant. He recognized the way the media reported Hurricane Katrina back in September and October of '05, he recognized the media had effectively blamed this whole natural disaster on a sitting president and his administration, which is extrordinary --
MILLER: Right.
SHEPPARD: -- and he realized, "I can take this hysteria, turn this into a movie, and make millions of dollars." And now, $100 million later, he's right.
MILLER: Now, to be fair to him, I do believe that he had cobbled together a little, like, Stone Age equivalent of this slide show, as he called it, before then. But --
SHEPPARD: Yeah. He was doing this slide presentation for about 20 years, and of course, nobody picked up the fact that for 20 years he's been saying that we've got about 10 years to solve the problem.
MILLER: But he was at least smart enough to realize there was a tsunami coming, and he did catch the way, figuratively speaking.
SHEPPARD: And Dennis, we both have -- I mean, as capitalists, we have to admire --
MILLER: That is inevitable.
SHEPPARD: -- [unintelligible] make money.
MILLER: I thought the silliest of the nine was No. 7, where he said that seawater was Satan's tears. That seemed a little silly to me. A little simplistic, possibly.
In an Oct. 13 NewsBusters post containing the audio, Sheppard frets that "I've debated whether or not this should be posted" out of concern over "seemingly shameless self-promotion." We have to wonder if perhaps Sheppard's real concern is that we, his biggest fans, would call him out on yet more false and misleading claims.
