well.

Bacon found the most negative coverage in the country's top-selling Murdoch tabloids — the Melbourne Herald Sun and the Sydney Daily Telegraph. The Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt is said to be the top-read columnist in Australia. He presents as an outright skeptic of climate change, at one point calling competing newspapers that treat it as settled science "propagandists."

The topic is a frequent subject of his political opinion show on the broadcast Network Ten.

That network is not owned by News Corp., but its chairman is Lachlan Murdoch, who remains a corporate director and major investor at his father's company.

Scratching Their Heads

The journalists I spoke to in Australia tell me they have a tough time reconciling Murdoch's corporate announcement in 2007 with the coverage in his papers.

"Everybody was rather takenaback and it seemed to change the editorial tone of climate change coverage for a very short period of time — but not very long. I think it lasted a year, perhaps less," said Monica Attard, a former foreign correspondent, media critic and host for the ABC, Australia's public broadcasting network.

"And then we were all left scratching our heads as to what Rupert's missive that News Limited was to become a green company was actually all about," said Attard, now managing editor of the online Global Mail, based in Sydney. "Nobody quite understood. Perhaps they turned the lights off at night. We weren't really sure."

As it happens, News Corp. executive James Murdoch — Rupert's younger son — held his own grand announcement in London last year. News Corp.