[More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.]
The 11 April 2014 edition of CBS This Morning set aside almost six and a half minutes of air time to promote Showtime's upcoming series about climate change, which features liberal New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and CBS's Lesley Stahl. Charlie Rose heralded the "groundbreaking new documentary series," and let Friedman spotlight Arab environmentalists, who supposedly "understand that there's no Shiite air or Sunni air. If we don't protect the commons, nobody's going to breathe."
Rose, along with co-anchor Norah O'Donnell and Gayle King also turned to Stahl, who ballyhooed how "all these floods we've heard about – much more disastrous than they have been in our lifetime. That's because the ice is melting. It's affecting the seawater all along the eastern shore of the United States." King fawned over the new TV series, and set up Friedman to speculate about "climate change skeptics" might react to it:
GAYLE KING: ...How do you think that the climate change skeptics will react to what they're going to see on this series? It's fascinating and so well done.
TOM FRIEDMAN: Well, you know, I can't predict – you can't talk someone out of something they haven't actually been talked into. You know, so much of this is, I think, emotional reaction. But I think the power of this series is that it tells the story through the experiences of real people, you know, living in real communities. Al Gore did an amazing job with An Inconvenient Truth, but that was one man telling millions. What this series is about is actually millions telling many more millions about how climate change is impacting their real lives.