KOA's Rosen omitted Exxon-funded Heartland's "free-market" agenda of promoting global-warming skepticism

Summary: Newsradio 850 KOA's Mike Rosen introduced guest Maureen Martin, "a senior fellow for legal affairs at the Heartland Institute," for a discussion on the politics of global warming, but did not mention that the "free-market" think tank has received funding from ExxonMobil Corp. or that its president has described the scientific consensus on climate change as "the mass delusion of our time."

Discussing the politics of global warming on his April 15 Newsradio 850 KOA broadcast, Mike Rosen introduced his guest, Maureen Martin, as "a senior fellow for legal affairs at the Heartland Institute," but did not disclose the think tank's "free-market " agenda, its president's description of the scientific consensus on global warming as a "mass delusion," or its past funding from ExxonMobil Corp., as Colorado Media Matters has noted.

Promoting Martin's "great case study" of letters Heartland received from a sixth-grade class at a Wildomar, California, middle school reproaching the think tank for denying the harmful effects of global warming, Rosen introduced Martin before the interview:

Maureen Martin is a senior fellow for legal affairs at the Heartland Institute. And the Heartland Institute, among other things, publishes the Environment & Climate News; it's a monthly newspaper, as it describes itself, for common-sense environmentalists. And in the current issue, Maureen has an account of a deluge of letters she got from students, sixth-grade students whose teacher is Michael Steria at David A. Brown Middle School in Wildomar, California. We'll share with you the content of some of those letters. And then in a companion piece, Maureen goes on and gives us some more background and detail on this.

However, Rosen did not mention Heartland's background related to global warming. As Colorado Media Matters has pointed out, the think tank received $115,000 from ExxonMobil in 2006. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, from 1998 to 2005 Heartland received $561,500 from the fossil fuels company, including $119,000 in 2005 alone. The think tank also maintains a separate "Global Warming Facts" Web page that promotes books by and offers links to the works of authors critical of mainstream climate-change theories, as well as a "Primer on Global Warming" section with links for topics such as "There is no consensus."

A monthly Heartland publication, Environment & Climate News, has published numerous articles promoting skepticism of global warming's anthropogenic causes, even though organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change share the consensus view that, as stated in a June 2006 NAS report, "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming" of the planet. Additionally, as Colorado Media Matters noted, the managing editor of Environment & Climate News, James Taylor, made several misleading and debunked claims regarding global warming when he appeared on the March 20 broadcast of KBDI Channel 12's Independent Thinking with host and Independence Institute President Jon Caldara.

Further, as Martin mentioned during Rosen's broadcast, Heartland recently sponsored the "2008 International Conference on Climate Change," which, according to Heartland President Joseph L. Bast, brought together "more than 200 scientists and other experts on climate change" who have "stood up to political correctness and defended the scientific method at a time when doing so threatens their research grants, tenure, and ability to get published. Some of them have even faced death threats for daring to speak out against what can only be called the mass delusion of our time."

Heartland promotes itself as a "free-market" research and education organization:

Heartland's mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. Such solutions include parental choice in education, choice and personal responsibility in health care, market-based approaches to environmental protection, privatization of public services, and deregulation in areas where property rights and markets do a better job than government bureaucracies.

As Colorado Media Matters noted, on his July 31, 2007, broadcast, Rosen promoted Heartland, along with several other sources, as providing what he called "good, solid, hard rebuttals" of the scientific consensus that human activity is largely responsible for a rise in global temperatures in recent decades.

From the April 15 broadcast of Newsradio 850 KOA's The Mike Rosen Show:

ROSEN: Here's a great case study: Maureen Martin is a senior fellow for legal affairs at the Heartland Institute. And the Heartland Institute, among other things, publishes the Environment & Climate News; it's a monthly newspaper, as it describes itself, for common-sense environmentalists. And in the current issue, Maureen has an account of a deluge of letters she got from students, sixth-grade students whose teacher is Michael Steria at David A. Brown Middle School in Wildomar, California. We'll share with you the content of some of those letters. And then in a companion piece, Maureen goes on and gives us some more background and detail on this. We've got her on the line right now. Maureen, thanks for joining us this morning.

MARTIN: Thank you, Mike.

ROSEN: Now, presumably these youngsters, these sixth graders, are regular subscribers to the Environment & Climate news, right?

MARTIN: I don't think so.

ROSEN: You don't think so? Just as they must read the Wall Street Journal every day.

MARTIN: No.

ROSEN: No, you don't think so?

MARTIN: No.

ROSEN: How in the world did the Heartland Institute, and Environment & Climate News, and you get on their radar screen?

MARTIN: Well, in early March, the Heartland Institute sponsored the first international conference for skeptics on climate change, and more than a hundred scientists came and did presentations. Those -- by the way, the audio is on our website. We can talk more about that later.

ROSEN: Sure.

MARTIN: But these hundred scientists and other experts gathered in New York City. The conference was attended by around 550 other individuals who just wanted, you know, to get exposed to the truth, and, you know, and the truth is complicated. So we had that conference, and the publicity was pretty enormous for it. Because it was the first time that, you know, these scientists, who many, you know, work at universities and were just working on their own, and they gathered together and it was a pretty exciting occasion, and there was media publicity, and that's apparently what put us, The Heartland Institute, on the radar screen, at least for the teacher.

—C.H.