By Paul Farhi

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Fox News Channel's top Washington editor ordered network reporters to couple any mention of global climate change with skepticism about data underlying such a scientific conclusion, according to an e-mail released by a liberal media-watchdog group Wednesday.

Media Matters for America said the internal e-mail from Bill Sammon, Fox News' Washington bureau chief, called into question the network's impartiality in reporting on the subject.

In an e-mail sent last December to Fox News' journalists after a global conference on climate change, Sammon asked Fox journalists to "refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies."

Media Matters, a group that tracks perceived conservative favoritism in the news media, said it obtained the e-mail from a Fox News employee it did not identify.

Sammon and Fox News could not be reached for comment.

Ari Rabin-Havt, Media Matters' head of research, said the e-mail showed Fox News was attempting to create a false impression of the climate issue by giving a "fringe" minority of climate-change warming skeptics equal weight with those who have concluded the planet is growing warmer.

"The overwhelming, vast majority of scientists who have studied climate change" accept the trend as fact, he said.