Without a doubt it's because they publish stories that are hideous bunk, that are works of fiction, that desecrate the very idea of truth and they do it without blinking, without shame and without remorse.
Like this one:
Climate change is already killing 300,000 people a year in a “silent crisis” that is seriously affecting hundreds of millions more, an influential humanitarian group warned today.
A report by the Global Humanitarian Forum, led by Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General, says that the effects of climate change are growing in such a way that it will have a serious impact on 600 million people, almost ten per cent of the world’s population, within 20 years. Almost all of these will be in developing countries.
So what do the experts say about the report? Roger Pielke Jnr takes up the story:
It is a methodological embarrassment and poster child for how to lie with statistics. The report will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed ... The report is worse than fiction, it is a lie.
And how did our green friends work out the figure of 300,000? Pielke Jnr again:
[T]o get around the fact that there has been no attribution of the relationship of [greehouse gas] emissions and disasters, this report engages in a very strange comparison of earthquake and weather disasters in 1980 and 2005. The first question that comes to mind is, why? They are comparing phenomena with many “moving parts” over a short time frame, and attributing 100% of the resulting difference to human-caused climate change. This boggles the mind.
As Pielke points out, when these calculations are done properly the differences in disaster losses are attributable completely to socio-economic factors.
The report is clearly a travesty. Who is going to mourn the newspapers that publish it?