Matt Yglesias has a great post deconstructing the badness of a particularly egregious headline from the Washington Post, "Climate Is Risky Issue for Democrats." This is what we mean when we say the media is broken.
The leading candidates for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination have all responded to this public, diplomatic, and elite concern with fairly similar policies grounded in the scientific consensus that sharp reduction in US carbon emissions are necessary, and in the economics consensus that the most efficient way to achieve those reductions is by putting a price on carbon emissions -- either in the form of a tax, or in the form of an auction of tradeable emissions permits. The Republican Party, meanwhile, remains mired in half-measures that don't address the full of extent of the problem and don't even accomplish what they do accomplish in an efficient manner. And those are the good Republicans! Others, like the President of the United States of America and several of the leading contenders to replace him remain mired in denial about the extent or nature of the problem, and are so in hock to special interests in the coal and oil industries that they're unable to acknowledge that failing to adopt mandatory emission curbs will have some dramatic deleterious consequences.
The Washington Post's headline writers, under the time honored principled Everything is Bad News for Democrats, naturally decides to sum that situation up as "Climate is Risky Issue for Democrats". The article itself, I might add, is much better, with reporter Juliet Eilprin downplaying the horse race angle in favor of saying something about the policies at hand, quoting pollster Stan Greenberg's observation that "It's a huge issue. I've been stunned by this" before turning to the Dems-are-doomed theory, and quoting Newt Gingrich's view that "a candidate who's anti-environment and denies global warming gets killed in the suburbs."
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