'Yes Men' vs. Chamber's 'No Men': Hoaxes are bad for journalism, but there may be some truths in there

WE HATE to be spoilsports, but as members of the news media, we have to oppose hoaxes perpetrated on us and - through us - on the American people.

The way most TV news channels were swept up into the "Boy in the Balloon" story last week - even though many producers' BS detectors surely had to be going off - has led to a round of soul-searching about how easily they were fooled. This will last until the next fame-seeker with a bright idea comes along.

In the meantime, we're with Fort Collins, Colo., authorities who are prosecuting Richard and Mayumi Heene for making false statements to police. Unfortunately, there are no child-abuse laws that cover using your kids to lie - and vomit, too - on national television. Maybe, as "reality TV" continues to metastasize, there ought to be.

So we have to have the same contempt for the "Yes Men," a group of professional hoaxers who last week sent out phony news releases in the name of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - and followed it Monday with a phony news conference at the National Press Club. They pretended that the chamber had reversed its position on climate change (which has been to oppose doing anything at all about it).

An official of the chamber broke up the news conference, but not before some news outlets had been taken in: A Reuters report was picked up by the New York Times and several Web sites.

No doubt there's room for more diligence on the part of the media. But if sending out news releases with fake letterheads and, we presume, fake contacts were to become a trend, it would further the decline of "real" journalism - and that wouldn't do anyone any good.

This isn't the first hoax by the Yes Men. In fact, there's a new documentary, "The Yes Men Fix the World," available on HBO, that details their past anti-corporate stunts, and which, frankly, could be seen as their own conflict of interest, undermining their own credibility a bit.

But here's the thing: What the fake chamber spokesman told the assembled reporters on Monday was the simple truth:

"Ecologists tell us that if we don't enact dramatic reductions in carbon emissions today, within five years we could begin facing the propagating feedback loops of runaway climate change, which would mean a destruction of food and water supplies worldwide, with the result of mass migrations, famine and death on a scale never before imagined," he said.

"Needless to say, that would be bad for business. We at the chamber have until now tried to keep climate science from interfering with business. But without a stable climate, there will be no business. We need business more than we need relentlessly higher returns."

The chamber is funding an expensive lobbying campaign against congressional action on climate change and, yes, health-care reform, too. It has spent $34.6 million just this quarter. In apparent response, several high-profile companies that have interest in clean energy have quit the organization: Exelon, PNM Resources, PG&E, Apple and, just Tuesday, Mohawk Fine Paper.

The chamber would better serve its members and the nation if it had gone along with the hoax and adopted the "fake" position. Instead, by taking a hard right off Main Street, it is shooting itself in its very expensive footware.