JOHN Howard is called a "conviction politician". But the media - corrupted by alarmists - got too much even for him.

This week Howard admitted he'd caved in to the global warming hype not because of "the science" but the votes.

"I am unconvinced that catastrophe is around the corner," Howard said in London, where he told the pro-sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation he was a warming "agnostic".

But in his last year as prime minister, Howard could no longer resist the panic pushed by our Leftist media.

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"Late in 2006 my Government hit a 'perfect storm' on the issue," Howard said.

"Drought had lingered for several years in many parts of Eastern Australia, leading to severe restrictions on the daily use of water; not for the first or last time the bushfire season started early; the report by Sir Nicholas Stern hit the shelves . . . and . . . Al Gore released his movie An Inconvenient Truth.

"To put it bluntly 'doing something' about global warming gathered strong political momentum in Australia."

Howard, in desperation, promised an emissions trading scheme, but still lost to the more convincingly warmist Kevin Rudd.

It is easy to damn Howard for weakness - and I do. Still, how could he keep fighting a media that screamed down any sceptics?

Now, of course, the drought is ended, the dams have refilled and the atmosphere hasn't warmed in 15 years. The hype has receded.

But in 2007, almost no one in the media pointed out Gore's movie was riddled with errors.

Almost nobody in the media pointed out warmist scientists were also wrong in claiming the drought was evidence of global warming, although even Tim Flannery's Climate Commission years later had to admit it couldn't "identify anything that is distinctly unusual about the post-1950 pattern" of rainfall, after all.

One TV station even showed animation of huge fireballs smashing into our cities as a warning.

And still the media misleads us. Worse, journalism academics praise what is the most shameful collective failure of journalism in my lifetime.

Wendy Bacon is a professorial fellow at the UTS Australian Centre for Independent Journalism and led students in an investigation into how newspapers report global warming.

Astonishingly, Bacon, interviewed last week on the ABC's Media Report, praised Fairfax papers such as The Age and Sydney Morning Herald as true believers in the global warming faith who'd silenced heretics.

"Fairfax media basically says and does in practice accept the consensus position and recently they've said that very explicitly and they are not publishing sceptic letters," she said.

"What that means in practice is that they've pretty much stopped publishing any columns from outside by sceptic authors."

A real journalist should be horrified by newspapers shutting down a debate in which even leading global warming scientists disagreed.

But, no, the sympathetic Media Report host didn't even blink. And Bacon, who earlier this year declared "I'm voting Green in the election because I'm a journalist", reserved her outrage for the country's "most prominent sceptic". Yes, modest me.

Why, Bacon protested, were my editors "providing this strategic role to this person who is actually abusive to climate scientists".

Abusive? Yes, because "he says it in a factual way that they are lying".

Indeed, I've presented evidence in such a factual way that Bacon and her students do not identify a single error. (I don't actually call scientists "liars", by the way.)

Let me now demonstrate the kind of journalism that so offends Bacon and which the ABC deplores rather than practises.

Two weeks ago Greens leader Christine Milne made at least seven false or misleading claims about global warming when interviewed by the ABC.

Another non-surprise: not one of her claims was challenged by the host, exposed on the ABC's Media Watch or criticised on any ABC program.

But "mistakes" they clearly were. For instance, Milne linked last month's NSW fires to global warming because "we know that south-eastern Australia is experiencing a drying trend".

In fact, NSW's rainfall has increased over the past century.

Milne claimed we've had "the hottest winter". In fact, that's not true of Australia or the Southern Hemisphere and not a measure of global warming anyway.

Milne even urged us to "look at Cyclone Yasi" as evidence of warming.

In fact, the Bureau of Meteorology reports a big fall in the number of cyclones here.

A warmist like Milne can exaggerate wildly, yet gets nothing but praise on the ABC and in Fairfax newspapers.

A sceptic can point out Milne's mistakes and that's just "abuse".

That's just another wicked sceptic who "says it in a factual way that they are lying".

No wonder John Howard gave up.

Originally published as Debate not the same as abuse