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about a set of hacked emails that was pushed by a group of avid climate skeptics…. Collectively, they
took a mountain of stolen material, condensed it into a well-packaged pitch, and sparked a scandalous
story that reached virtually every major news outlet in the world.” 35 A postmortem analysis of the
affair by Goodwin reveals a well-choreographed media strategy whereby those promoting the story
used coordinated messaging to seize control of the story and dictate the terms of its evolution.
Goodwin analyzed how the phrases denialists introduced in discussions on fringe Web sites
were readily adopted over the following days by major media outlets. 36 Between November 20 and
26, for example, he followed the propagation of the phrase “smoking gun” from fossil fuel industry
advocates such as Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Noel Sheppard of
Newsbusters, and Steve Milloy, to the New York Times , Fox News, and CBS News. The phrase “final
nail in the coffin [of global warming]” spread during the same period from polemicist James
Delingpole's Telegraph blog and Stephen McIntyre's climateaudit, to conservative sites such as Free
Republic and the Drudge Report, then onto Fox News and—in the form of an Inhofe op-ed—the Wall
Street Journal . Calls for an investigation and preemptive cries of “whitewash” were propagated by
Chris Horner and other bloggers, and eventually made it onto the pages of conservative and even
mainstream newspapers. 37
Figure 14.2: Climategate
The essence of the so-called climategate episode is captured in a cartoon. [ Nick Anderson Editorial Cartoon used with the permission
of Nick Anderson, the Washington Post Writers Group and the Cartoonist Group. All rights reserved.]
The repetitive use by deniers of phrases like “smoking gun” and “final nail in the coffin [of
global warming],” Goodwin concluded, “would probably make GOP wordsmith Frank Luntz proud.
By sticking to a small set of familiar, eye-catching, and dramatic-sounding memes, the denialosphere
succeeded in getting many of the mainstream outlets covering the stolen emails scandal to follow suit
by using the same language again and again. So, instead of investigating who was behind the theft, or
exploring the context of some of the supposedly scandalous things said in private emails between a
 
 
 
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