The New York Times Truth Will Out. Or Be Outed by Recent Employees

Revkin: "Stuff that the Bush administration got involved in was a no-brainer getting that on the front page of the New York Times."

I've said it before and I'll now say it again: Your go-to point man for everything significant on Climategate is Tom Nelson's aggregation blog. Nelson's got so many links links and pointers going up that you can't really keep up with it all, but Nelson will help you out if you keep scanning.

The most important item this morning is Nelson's quick review of a long audio starring Andrew Revkin, late of the New York Times (Revkin Taking NYT Buyout : Veteran climate reporter to leave paper after Copenhagen summit -- CJR ). Revkin, during his 14-year tenure as one of the Times' top environmental reporters, was often a willing tool and fool of the Alarmists -- before "The Big Cutoff". How did that work for them? Well, as Revkin admits in this long recording from a Harvard / Shorenstein Center seminar "on news coverage of climate change," it was easy....

The tape is around two hours in length but Nelson listens for us and plucks out this telling passage in: Tom Nelson: Extremely revealing comments from Andrew Revkin:

Around the 1:45:13 mark, Revkin says: "One thing that's interesting to note...in this administration shift is that all the coverage that I did of all those obfuscations, editing, censorship and stuff that the Bush administration got involved in was a no-brainer getting that on the front page of the New York Times... Now, theoretically, should I be just as aggressively writing about these revelations? [nervous laugh]. There's total..complete differences between what was going on then and some of the things you've heard about recently in terms of the scientific integrity of the IPCC... The bottom line is , there was a predisposition at my newspaper to say hey, that's a great get; there's a major front page story... when Phil Cooney... editing climate reports and all that stuff... it fit a very comfortable theme that all environmental stories for the longest period of time had, which is there's bad guys and good guys. Heh. Shame on you. Shame on you.

Now people who have been paying attention to the endless slanting and bias that have become the hallmarks of the New York Times already know all this. But it is notable when an insider like Andrew Revkin either goes off the reservation or forgets himself and admits, in plain English, "... there was a predisposition at my newspaper to say hey, that's a great get; there's a major front page story...when Phil Cooney...editing climate reports and all that stuff...it fit a very comfortable theme that all environmental stories for the longest period of time had, which is there's bad guys and good guys. Shame on you. Shame on you."

That's fits with my own personal and "very comfortable theme" that the New York Times has become a discordant anvil chorus on which the editors and their feeders daily grind some very dull axes. Shame on you all.

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Walter Mead has a penetrating essay on this subject at DC Post Runs With Climategate; NY Times Still in Tank

"The Times' behavior is increasingly hard to explain. In the last month the paper has given away a huge story once again, this time handing it over to the British press overseas and, over here, to the blogosphere and, finally and belatedly, the Washington Post. Coming at a time when the Times is on the defensive in terms of its journalistic reputation and its financial health, the impact of the current failure is likely to be significantly greater. Authority is the Times'€˜ most important asset; by missing Climategate the Times is not only doing its readers a serious disservice. It is reinforcing the narrative that the Grey Lady of the mainstream media is too slow, too hampered by inhibitions and bias, too close to its sources, to serve as a reliable source for news."

Posted by Vanderleun at February 15, 2010 1:45 PM