How Climategate killed faith in the media

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
Dec. 03, 2009

HERE’S a test of the media’s health. Search on Google for the term “Climategate”. Wow: ~~18.6 million~~ 27 million mentions already.

Now search for “Climategate” on the ABC’s online site. Er, just two? And one just a reader’s retort?

Do the same search at The Age and the results show much the same wild mismatch. And in that cavern is where blogs now bloom, and some papers die.

Climategate refers to leaked University of East Anglia emails that reveal how the key scientists behind global warming theory faked data, destroyed evidence needed to check their work, and conspired to silence sceptics. They even show some admitting the world isn’t warming as predicted.

You may think all this fatal to global warming theory or not. But what you can’t think is that it isn’t a story at all.

After all, two universities are already holding inquiries, and the White House has had to defend even Barack Obama’s warmist beliefs.

The emails may even have cost Malcolm Turnbull his job, since every Liberal who voted in his one-vote loss knew of this scandal that now undermined his own warmist faith.

So why so little mainstream reporting of it? Let me answer by anecdote.

Here’s Jon Faine, ABC Melbourne 774 morning host, explaining why he will not even discuss Climategate: “I decided that it wasn’t (significant) and we wouldn’t spend time on it. It suits the conspiracy theorists beautifully.”

By “conspiracy theorists”, Faine, a passionate warmist, meant “sceptics”.

Another example. The ABC’s Lateline did, true, put one brief report on Climategate to air. I even appeared in it.

But since? Host Tony Jones this week interviewed fellow warmist and green guru Lord Nicholas Stern about bad sceptics for almost 10 minutes without once asking about Climategate, which so justified the sceptics’ stand.

By contrast, Stern then left the London studio from which he’d been speaking to deliver, minutes later, another fiery talk on global warming.

As AM reported the next day, there was no escaping Climategate this time: “Stern’s press conference was hijacked by questions about the underlying science of his assumptions after hackers broke into the computer systems of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit last month.”

The moral: the tens of thousands of Australians who’ve searched for news on Climategate will have found that they cannot trust the mainstream media to give them even the bare facts.

They must turn to the internet instead, and especially to blogs they trust to speak freely. So for all those in the ABC and Age who deplore the influence of my blog, thanks for my record traffic over these past two weeks.

Fools. You cut your own throats.