high school. She’d pursued every opportunity to get those breaks, and once she did, she’d worked damn hard at grabbing her share of airtime and overcoming the endemic misogyny and the subtle bullying in the industry. She thrived on the stories she covered and the experiences she shared with her viewers, she loved stepping in front of that camera and telling the world what she’d found out, and undeniably, the camera loved her back. She had that unquantifiable magnetism that went beyond the purely physical. People just tuned in and enjoyed her company. Focus groups confirmed her broad appeal: Women weren’t threatened by her, they took a possessive pride in her expertise, and in an age where public image was everything and every word was carefully weighed for effect, her candor and honesty were a big draw; men, while readily admitting that they fancied the pants off her, more often than not pointed out how they found her brain to be just as much of a turn-on.
And so she’d gone from local reporter at a network affiliate in Wisconsin to weekend anchor at a bigger affiliate in Illinois and eventually to anchor and special correspondent for the network’s flagship Special Investigations Unit. In the process, she’d become a face America trusted, whether she was reporting from Kuwait in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, on board a Greenpeace vessel stalking Japanese whaling ships, or following the unfolding tragedies of the tsunami in Thailand and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
More recently, she’d been unwittingly drawn into the emotionally charged debate on global warming. She’d approached the issue as a skeptic, her instincts compelling her to question—on air—the often lazy assumptions of the ever-more-fashionable, almost religious, environmental movement. She knew how unreliable long-term forecasts were, how history was littered with the failed predictions of the most brilliant minds on everything from population levels to oil prices, and she hadn’t minced her words when voicing her skepticism. Up until then, her honesty and integrity had served her well. On this issue, her candor proved to be a problem. The reaction had been nothing less than incendiary. She was lambasted for her doubts from all corners, and her career had hung in the balance.
She decided the subject matter merited her attention, whichever side of the fence she ended up on. She pitched a comprehensive, no-holds-barred, in-depth documentary tackling the issue, and the network’s brass signed off on it. And so, with the vast majority of her colleagues mired in the quicksands of the marathon election campaign back home, she focused her energies on examining all the available data on the climate issue and meeting everyone who mattered. She was soon convinced that greenhouse gases had undoubtedly risen in the last few decades, and the earth did appear to be warming, but she still needed to find out if the connection between the two was as direct as it was now being portrayed. And so she’d crisscrossed the globe, from the remote science station of Cherskii in Siberia, where 40,000-year-old permafrost was now thawing and, in the process, releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gases, to Greenland, where massive glaciers were sliding toward the sea at a rate of two yards every hour, taking a forensic look at every new report on the matter during her travels.
Her investigative claws sharpened when she looked into the Global Climate Coalition, the Information Council of the Environment, and the Greening Earth Society—all of them cleverly misnamed, created and funded by the automotive, petroleum, and coal industries with the sole purpose of deceiving the public by spreading disinformation and callously repositioning global warming as
theory
rather than
fact
. It didn’t take long for her to become more and more convinced that the planet was indeed in trouble because of us. What was far less clear, however, was what we could
And so she’d gone from local reporter at a network affiliate in Wisconsin to weekend anchor at a bigger affiliate in Illinois and eventually to anchor and special correspondent for the network’s flagship Special Investigations Unit. In the process, she’d become a face America trusted, whether she was reporting from Kuwait in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, on board a Greenpeace vessel stalking Japanese whaling ships, or following the unfolding tragedies of the tsunami in Thailand and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
More recently, she’d been unwittingly drawn into the emotionally charged debate on global warming. She’d approached the issue as a skeptic, her instincts compelling her to question—on air—the often lazy assumptions of the ever-more-fashionable, almost religious, environmental movement. She knew how unreliable long-term forecasts were, how history was littered with the failed predictions of the most brilliant minds on everything from population levels to oil prices, and she hadn’t minced her words when voicing her skepticism. Up until then, her honesty and integrity had served her well. On this issue, her candor proved to be a problem. The reaction had been nothing less than incendiary. She was lambasted for her doubts from all corners, and her career had hung in the balance.
She decided the subject matter merited her attention, whichever side of the fence she ended up on. She pitched a comprehensive, no-holds-barred, in-depth documentary tackling the issue, and the network’s brass signed off on it. And so, with the vast majority of her colleagues mired in the quicksands of the marathon election campaign back home, she focused her energies on examining all the available data on the climate issue and meeting everyone who mattered. She was soon convinced that greenhouse gases had undoubtedly risen in the last few decades, and the earth did appear to be warming, but she still needed to find out if the connection between the two was as direct as it was now being portrayed. And so she’d crisscrossed the globe, from the remote science station of Cherskii in Siberia, where 40,000-year-old permafrost was now thawing and, in the process, releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gases, to Greenland, where massive glaciers were sliding toward the sea at a rate of two yards every hour, taking a forensic look at every new report on the matter during her travels.
Her investigative claws sharpened when she looked into the Global Climate Coalition, the Information Council of the Environment, and the Greening Earth Society—all of them cleverly misnamed, created and funded by the automotive, petroleum, and coal industries with the sole purpose of deceiving the public by spreading disinformation and callously repositioning global warming as
theory
rather than
fact
. It didn’t take long for her to become more and more convinced that the planet was indeed in trouble because of us. What was far less clear, however, was what we could
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