Climategate: The Real Story - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 150

handful of climate scientists, many mainstream outlets followed the lead of the denier choir by
repeating their version of events.” 38
The most disheartening aspect of “climategate” was the willingness of respected media outlets
to uncritically parrot the accusations and innuendo being spun by the professional climate change
denial machine. It was hardly surprisingly when Fox News headlined the affair as “global warming's
Waterloo.” 39 But within days of the hack, both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran
multiple news articles adopting the denialist frame, focusing on the various out-of-context, cherry-
picked words and phrases such as “hide the decline” and “trick.” There was little or no discussion
about the crime involved in hacking a university server and who might have been behind it, let alone
who stood to benefit from it. Coverage by the UK press, including the progressive Guardian , was no
better.
The networks waited longer to cover the story, but once they did, their coverage was for the
most part similarly sensationalistic and slanted. Over the six-day period of December 3 to 9, 2009, I
did interviews with each of the national television news organizations (ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN
twice—both American Morning and the Campbell Brown Show ). The NBC Today Show and CNN's
coverage were reasonable overall. 40 CNN did in fact go out of its way to correct some of the
distortions being advanced by climate change deniers. 41 But my experiences with John Roberts,
cohost of CNN's American Morning , were mixed. When Roberts first interviewed me in 1998 for
CBS Evening News after our original Nature hockey stick article was published, he had pushed me
toward overstating the implications of our study—something I resisted. It was somewhat ironic that
Roberts's coverage of events surrounding the hacking of the East Anglia site was now suggesting that
scientists had been overselling the evidence for climate change. While I found Roberts both fair and
amiable in my personal dealings with him, 42 I was disappointed in how he had fallen for faux
“balance,” giving substantial air time to disingenuous claims of climate change deniers. 43
The coverage by ABC and CBS Evening News was far worse. ABC correspondent David
Wright repeated the outlandish claim that I had been “hiding the decline” in temperatures. 44 ABC
News issued a correction on its Web site a couple days later, but few viewers would have seen it.
CBS News, on February 4, 2010, ran a YouTube video ridiculing me and advancing the same “hide
the decline” distortion, while briefly noting—as if it were simply incidental—that I had been
exonerated of allegations of wrongdoing by Penn State University. 45 I had expected far better from the
network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.
In early January 2010, a reporter named Fred Guterl interviewed me under the pretense of a
piece to run in Discover magazine about the state of scientific understanding at the time of the
December Copenhagen conference, including the impacts of climategate. I was taken aback when a
fact-checker for Newsweek instead contacted me on Guterl's behalf, seeking to re-litigate now long-
discredited claims of Stephen McIntyre regarding the availability of our proxy data. Guterl's article
with the inflammatory title “Iceberg Ahead: Climate Scientists Who Play Fast and Loose with the
Facts Are Imperiling Not Just Their Profession but the Planet” appeared in Newsweek two months
later, on February 22, 2010. 46 The article resurrected the discredited hockey stick attacks, adding
bogus new “climategate” allegations and low blows at James Hansen and IPCC chair Rajendra
Pachauri for good measure. The article suffered from an increasingly familiar form of journalistic
malpractice wherein the fact I'd been absolved of wrongdoing was acknowledged while
simultaneously insinuating the very charges I'd been absolved of.