BigJourn: Fisking AP ClimateGate Article

On Andrew Breitbart's new BigJournalism.com website, there is a great fisking of the big AP writeup immediately after the ClimateGate scandal broke back in December 2009.

The AP's article probably had the largest reach of any writeup on the scandal, as it was no doubt featured prominently in most newspapers around the country as well as on countless news aggregator websites.

The AP assigned 5 reporters to the article, who reviewed the emails and got comment from only 4 scientists, taking pains to point out that the one AGW (anthropogenic global warming) skeptic was not a true scientist, even though the other quoted scientists were not in the field of climatology either. Further they distort what the scientists said, or at least what their positions were when contacted by the Big Journalism article's authors, to downplay the significance of the ClimateGate emails and computer code.

The AP article is also conspicuous in who it did not quote, including any of the Global Warming crowd who wrote the emails and computer code, or any of the skeptics who are frequently mentioned in the emails. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that with the computer code, the AP just hadn't had enough time to have computer programmer pore through all the code yet.

Here's the link to the Big Journalism article.

Be sure to read it. Articles like these are crucial to understanding the bias inherent in supposedly "objective" news reporting.

The biggest error by the AP is in coming to such sweeping and pre-judged conclusions as the headline "Science Not Faked..." when that remains to be seen. There have been many articles since ClimateGate broke which question some of the data itself, and not much can be determined for sure until these Global Warming scientists open up their data and climate models for independent review. The AP headline could have just as easily and validly have been "Scientists' Methods & Motives Now In Question".