Brent Bozell writes that PBS is a bit like Criswell--it wants to forecast the future (and making things up just as wildly), but with no accountability when reality fails to materialize as forecast:

Ted Turner was not only interviewed, but celebrated on PBS – on April Fool’s Day. The prank was apparently on PBS. It was as if Turner had a subversive mission, to prove that PBS isn’t just for smart people. True to form, Turner walked off a cliff of rhetorical excess on the “Charlie Rose” show, charging that global warming was going to grow so severe, that in a few decades, most of humanity would be extinct. “We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten -- not ten, but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.”

Charlie Rose should have been embarrassed, but wasn’t. When Turner said during the show “It’s been a long time since anybody caught me saying something stupid,” he should have administered a Breathalyzer test. Instead, at show’s end, he delivered an hommage to Turner’s humanitarianism. Rose was still seated, but the tone sounded like he was bowing deeply to his guest’s expansive intellect. “You’re a remarkable man,” he declared.

The global warming disaster-movie pushers always try to intimidate their opponents by insisting the finest scientific minds are all on their side. But Ted Turner is not one of the finest scientific minds in America. All you have to do is express the politically correct opinion, and PBS will treat you as one of the world’s great sages.

PBS is a natural habitat for this kind of wild-eyed lunacy. The taxpayer-funded network has a well-worn reputation for providing gloomy – and wholly inaccurate – predictions from environmental extremists. In 1990, the PBS documentary series “Race to Save the Planet” featured another one of those lesser scientific minds, actress Meryl Streep: “By the year 2000 -- that's less than 10 years away -- the earth's climate will be warmer than it's been in over 100,000 years. If we don't do something, there'll be enormous calamities in a very short time.”

Doesn’t everyone remember the massive human die-off of 2000? [Sure--it happened concurrently with the great leftwing migration to Canada and Europe that December...--Ed]

Al Gore went to Harvard with Erich Segal, the author of “Love Story,” so he knows that being in love with the planet Earth means never having to say you’re sorry when your doomsday pitches are massively, dreadfully wrong. But shouldn’t PBS and other media outlets be held accountable when doomsday predictions they’ve facilitated from 15 or 20 years ago fail to materialize?

Update: The BBC holds itself accountable on its global warming stories, in its own, sadly not-so-unique fashion.