Here’s a pretty egregious example of the media concept of “burying the lede”:
I couldn’t figure out how to embed the video, so you’ll have to click over to it. But this is the headline: “Electric cars create more pollution than gasoline powered vehicles: study.”
That was USA Today’s headline, and when I Googled the story I found several variations on that verbiage, which seems clearly slanted to pander to global-warming denialists and anyone else who encourages the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. If you drive an electric car because you’re concerned about climate change, the headline implies, you’re not only not making the problem better, you’re making it worse.
You’d have to read past the headline (and who does that these days?) to get to the rather important detail that this claim is only true about electric cars that are charged with electricity generated from fossil fuel-burning power plants, especially those that burn coal. Which, you know: duh. Burning carbon is the problem. Machines that cause carbon to be burned contribute to the problem.
That’s a good reason (yet another good reason) why we should stop burning fossil fuels, especially coal. It’s no sort of knock against electric cars themselves, but I bet you a barrel of whale oil that’s how the punditocracy and blogosphere will be spinning this study, if they aren’t already.
