For someone who writes for the nation’s “newspaper of record,” the reporter of this story doesn’t make the journalistic implications clear at all. The article pretty much just implies censorship and poor news judgment.

An owner of some Maine TV stations ordered his staff to cover no more global warming stories because: the science of global warming is not local, the issue is too political and the studies are inconclusive. The first reason is the most important, the second doesn’t affect newsworthiness and the third is probably wrong (even the author of “Global Warming and other Eco-Myths” has come around).

In a nutshell, local newspapers and TV stations focus on local news. Period. National news comes in from the wire (AP, Reuters) or the national network (Fox, ABC), and the local stations really have no place reporting on it. It would be horrendously inefficient for untold hundreds of stations and papers to make calls on every important national controversy. The White House staff could not conceivably handle all the demand.

The exception, of course, is when there is a local angle to the issue, which is what makes the owner possibly wrong on this count as well. Some papers I’ve worked for went out of their way to “localize” national stories, getting a few comments from area folks to go along with the nation-level reporting. Research by the Readership Institute has suggested people want more coverage in their own communities, so this is a happy medium between keeping things they way they used to be (too much national, not enough local) and cutting out important stories to make room for more small-time local stuff.

The manager was set off by a station covering Al Gore’s movie premier at an area theater, which is local news if enough people come out. It’s very possible that few people came and the station managers, probably being liberals, decided to cover it as a major event anyway, essentially promoting the movie and reporting on a national story. It’s also possible the story was just plain biased in favor of Al Gore. But if there is a newsworthy local global warming event in the future — a protest or prominent scientist or whatnot — stations need to be free to cover it, so the “no more stories” dictat is too much.

The station owner would have done better to criticize the specific story and remind his employees to keep it local, and the NYT would have been better to make all this clear. The American public doesn’t know much about how news works, and it would have been a great opportunity to clear up some confusion.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.