"Climategate 2.0": A scandal or unjust defamation?

By Steven T. Corneliussen

Concerning last week's release of another batch of email messages stolen in 2009 from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, a headline in Mother Jones asked, "Climategate 2.0: Will the media do its job this time?" The subhead called sarcastically for news coverage that doesn't abet the defaming of climatologists: "Rather than smearing scientists, reporters might want to try some actual reporting."

The liberal magazine condemned the sensationalism in reporting quotations from the messages out of context. But apparently it didn't ponder what sort of framing of the issue comes from the optional scandal term that appears in the magazine's own headline: Climategate.

At the Wall Street Journal, framing the issue as a scandal is the point. The headline on a 28 November WSJ op-ed borrows the language but inverts the sense of last week's Mother Jones headline: "Climategate 2.0: A new batch of leaked emails again shows some leading scientists trying to smear opponents."

The op-ed charges that "the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents, and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public." It also charges that the messages "show that major scientists ... can't be trusted to stick to the science and avoid political activism." An earlier version appeared last week in the WSJ's online Opinion Europe section.

Nor does the UK's Daily Mail have any trouble with framing the issue as "Climategate." Its headline exclaimed "Climategate scientists DID collude with government officials to hide research that didn't fit their apocalyptic global warming." Subheads trumpeted that "5,000 leaked emails reveal scientists deleted evidence that cast doubt on claims climate change was man-made," that "experts were under orders from US and UK officials to come up with a 'strong message,' " and that "critics claim: 'The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.'"

Overall, the Mother Jones piece judges recent press coverage disapprovingly:

More interesting ... is whether mainstream journalists will tread more cautiously this time than they did last in covering the emails. In 2009, most reporters just ignored it, and then, when they did bother writing about it, used the out-of-context quotes without taking the time to read the entire exchange or understand the science discussed therein. So, has the press done better this time? Not quite.

The magazine criticizes ABC News and the Washington Post for "unquestioningly repeating the out-of-context lines" and calls an Associated Press story "particularly atrocious," but lets the New York Times story off with only some mild scolding.

The Post story contained the framing term climategate in the headline when first placed online, but not in the paper edition. The piece distanced itself from the term when it pointed out that the controversy has been "dubbed 'Climate-gate' by some media outlets."  The framing term didn't appear in the Times story.

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.