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Everyone loves a whistle-blower. You know, someone on the inside of a scam, let's say, willing to risk everything to rat out a colleague or two.

More often than not, a whistle-blower tells all to a journalist, and headlines follow. If the story goes on long enough, even TV journalists will stumble onto it.

You know it's the mother lode when you're watching the Academy Awards, and George Clooney or Julia Roberts is accepting an Oscar for portraying the whistle-blower.

It's doubtful Hollywood producers are busy scouring the Hills of Beverly for someone to play Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson. They should.

This past week has been eye-opening for those the least bit interested in getting to the bottom of global warming coverage - not necessarily the issue, you see, but how the issue is played out in the media.

Samuelson, who has spent 23 years as a contributing editor for the weekly magazine, penned a column for the Washington Post Writers Group syndicate and performed an autopsy on his magazine's propaganda piece against those who dare question the status quo of global warming science and reportage.

You know it's going to be a fun read when Samuelson opens with: "We in the news business often enlist in moral crusades. Global warming is among the latest. Unfortunately, self-righteous indignation can undermine good journalism."

As evidence, he cites the Newsweek global warming cover story, a piece that Samuelson believes was "a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading."

If you didn't read the Newsweek story a few weeks back, you might remember the cover: a menacing shot of our fiery sun beneath the headline, "Global Warming Is A Hoax*" - in which the asterisk was for the subhead: "*Or claim the well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change. Inside the denial machine. By Sharon Begley."

Begley probably isn't giving Samuelson much love today, because Samuelson shames her and her editors for creating a "highly contrived story."

They "implied, for example, that Exxon Mobil used a think tank to pay academics to criticize global warming science," Samuelson said. "Actually, this accusation was long ago discredited, and Newsweek shouldn't have lent it respectability."

Before those delightful cards, letters and anonymous Web site postings flood in, please note I'm writing about Samuelson's laying bare the clearly subjective thought processes that went into creating the smear piece. He does so not because he doesn't believe global warming's going on - he clearly does - but because, he offers in conclusion, we're not served well when journalists "portray global warming as a morality tale - in which anyone who questions its gravity or proposed solutions may be ridiculed as a fool, a crank or an industry stooge. Dissent is, or should be, the lifeblood of a free society."

Perhaps Samuelson's revelation isn't box office gold. It does, however, push aside those greenhouse-gassers to give us a breath of fresh air.