EDITORIAL: Media complicity in Climategate

A tale of destroyed documents, fraud, conspiracy and the misuse of millions of government dollars would seem to have all the juicy ingredients of a scandal that journalists would kill to cover. However, the mainstream media apparently doesn't think that Climategate is news. ABC News hasn't deemed the story newsworthy. Neither has CBS nor NBC. If Americans only got their news from the networks, they would not know about the global-warming fraud or would merely think there was a simple misunderstanding about what scientists meant in some vague e-mails

Never mind that two major universities have at least temporarily removed prominent academics from heading major climate research facilities. Never mind that there are real questions raised about the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) controversial assessment report that the Obama administration and global-warming advocates have continually hyped in order to advance their case for new global regulations to curtail purported global warming.

Liberal news agencies might be casting a blind eye at this controversy, but even left-wing comedians such as "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart take these events seriously enough to make fun of the defenses being offered by the scientists caught in the scandal. Take one of Mr. Stewart's jokes regarding the now infamous e-mail about the "trick of adding in the real temps to each series ... to hide the decline [in temperature]." A Tuesday repartee follows:

Mr. Stewart: "It's nothing. He was just using a trick to hide the decline. It is just scientist speak for using a standard statistical technique recalibrating data in order to trick you into not knowing about the decline. But here is what is great about science in disagreement. We go back and look at the raw data."

Announcer: "University scientists say raw data from the 1980s was thrown out."

Jon Stewart: "Why would you go and throw out data from the 1980s? I still have Penthouses from the 1970s."

Despite cracks on late-night TV, the scandal is not considered newsworthy by the major television networks. The Media Research Center reported that through Tuesday, "none of the broadcast network weekday morning and evening news shows addressed Climategate or the incriminating [East Anglia climate scientist Phil] Jones development. ... This marked 12 days since the information was first uncovered that they have ignored this global scandal."

The networks found plenty of airtime to cover rumored family problems plaguing professional golfer Tiger Woods. Yet, even though there is climate-regulation legislation pending in Congress that could cost Americans trillions of dollars, network producers don't see anything newsworthy in a scandal exposing fraud in global-warming research. Such omissions make mainstream news complicit in the cover-up.