of the Walkley Award — the Australian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize — for her work exposing police corruption. She told me she was dumbstruck by the personal nature of the reply, saying she had done little research about the Murdoch press until recently.

Negative Coverage And Skepticism

The Australian has aggressively opposed the Green Party's agenda of addressing climate change through greater regulation and taxation of pollution. Two years ago, the paper vowed in an editorial that it would seek to destroy the party at the ballot box.

At an academic conference in fall 2010, a former environmental reporter at The Australian, Asa Wahlquist, said she fought with editors routinely over the extent and nature of her coverage

"I couldn't do it anymore," she told attendees, including environmental activists. "I hungin there for a long time because I thought it was important that at least I was in there trying."

The scholar and journalist Robert Manne wrote a lengthy critique of The Australian in which he, too, devoted a section to reviewing its climate change coverage. His conclusions echoed those of Bacon.

"On balance, the opinion pieces and the news coverage in the paper was on the side of those who were against the climate scientists," Manne said. "And that might be playing into the hands of the group I call the 'denialists' because all they have to do is create doubt in the public mind to make it much more difficult for politicians to take action."

The top editors and executives at The Australian took umbrage at that assessment, as