How the Rightwing Media Manipulate Climate Science

It seems there is no end of dishonesty to which the rightwing media won't resort in order to falsely discredit climate science.   An example of that is related by Simon Lewis, a climate change scientist, in Nature News.

Lewis's account concerns the venerable Sunday Times on a witchhunt against the IPCC.   The story concerned an IPCC finding that the Amazon rainforest might be at danger from drought.   Lewis was asked to comment.  He said that the claim was generally correct but said the wording should have been more careful and that the IPCC should have referenced the primary literature rather than citing an environmental group.  In other words, he confirmed the IPCC claim but said they could have presented it in a better form.

That wasn't the way the Sunday Times saw it.

The Sunday Times saw it differently. Its reporter, Jonathan Leake, asked both leading and genuinely inquisitive questions. I sent him scientific papers, and we discussed them. He agreed to read the finished piece to me over the telephone before publication. It stated, correctly, that the future of the Amazon is very uncertain, because the available data are limited. I was quietly pleased that I had 'spun' what I saw as a blogger's anti-IPCC tirade into a story about the science. Yet I was wrong. The newspaper headline was "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim", and worse, I was the expert quoted to support it. The article had been completely rewritten, essentially parroting North's blog, to include new quotes from me (genuine, but heavily edited and misleadingly taken out of context), and fabricated assertions about my views. An accompanying editorial called for the IPCC chairman to resign.

I was furious. Worse, the two conflicting versions of my views — on the BBC and in The Sunday Times — constituted a serious affront to my professional credibility. But what could I do? I added a comment under the online version of the article that my views were not accurately reported, and sent a letter for publication to The Sunday Times.

Weeks later the misleading article had been reproduced over 20,000 times on the Internet. My letter had been ignored and website comment deleted. Furthermore, my words and standing as an expert were being used by other newspapers to allege widespread corruption by IPCC scientists. As an Editorial on climate disinformation in this journal said at the time: "Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight." 

I needed to fight back.

And it took an awful lot of fighting.  Lewis had to take his story of The Times'  perfidy to The Guardian, climateprogress.org, and even The New York Times.  The Sunday Times tried to get away with a one line apology but Lewis held his ground.  Finally The Times caved, removed the article from its web page and replaced it with a formal correction and apology that was also published prominently in its paper.

This, however, stands as a clear example of just how willfully dishonest and deliberately disingenuous even a rightwing paper of the stature of the Sunday Times is willing to be to misinform the public and skew public opinion - if they think they can get away with it.