Well, it finally happened. Much of Canadian media broke radio silence on Climategate today. There really wasn’t much choice but to report it, now that Environment Minister Jim Prentice had officially described the allegations as “serious”, coupled with the day-old news that CRU head Phil Jones was “stepping aside” in preparation for his encounter with a double-decker.
As of this evening, there are 23,100,000 Google results for “climategate” – and exactly one on-air report from the CBC.
It’s been 14 days since the cork was pulled from FOIA 2009.zip
And as it turns out, the concerted efforts of a protective mainstream media to ignore the scandal turned out to be worst possible course of events for the University of Anglia’s motley CRU and their supporters in the wealth distribution industry.
They gave us something very powerful – 14 days of time. Time, while scores of bloggers and thousands of readers put in uncountable man hours of dissection and analysis.
Time for those who’d been discussed and copied in the leaked emails to confirm that there was no evidence of tampering.
Time for programmers to sift through Harry’s now famous code line by line, to test it for themselves.
Time for members of the academic community to get their outrage and condemnation on the record, and on their own terms. Time for those who’d been targeted to retell their stories.
Time for opinion columnists and talk radio to break ranks and take on the job their news editors refused to do, to disseminate the facts gathered, checked and analyzed by bloggers to a wider audience.
Time for the comments sections of every online newspaper in the western world to fill with angry demands from their readers to cover the damned story. Not because they were needed anymore, but because we wanted the stupid charade to end.
So when Peter Mansbridge went on the National tonight to admit what he had surely known for days, we didn’t watch to find out what’s contained in FOIA 2009.zip, for we’d read it for ourselves.
We only watched to see if he had.
For perhaps the first time in the history of mass media, the gatekeepers broke a major scandal to an audience fully 10 days ahead of them.
It’s a spin doctor’s worst nightmare.
As I’ve been saying from the beginning, they’re hearing the sound of all hell breaking loose. And as much as it’s being directed at the research institutions and the policy makers following along like so many imprinted penguins, the bulk of public rage has focused on the media.
I don’t think my friends in traditional news gathering truly appreciate what it is they’ve done. I don’t believe they fully comprehend how gravely they have injured themselves, and how they’re driving home the razor into an industry already struggling for survival with abbreviated, dismissive, misleading reports and “denier” and “conspiracy nut” slurs.
The bloggers tried to warn them. The opinion columnists tried to warn them, the talk hosts tried to warn them. Their readers, viewers and listeners tried to warn them.
The news media perfected the business of bombshells. They wind them up, drop them, film the explosion, and move on.
They’re just learning now that we’re in the business of bottle genies.
The easiest turf war victory evaaaah !
The other side pleaded ‘no contest’.
Kate, you have posted some real gems, but this has to be the best one yet.
The knock out line;
“So when Peter Mansbridge went on the National tonight to admit what he had surely known for days, we didn’t watch to find out what’s contained in FOIA 2009.zip, for we’d read it for ourselves.
We only watched to see if he had.”
They were so worried about which way to spin that they forgot what the meaning of scoop was.
What beat’em wasn’t the zig or the zag, it was the lag.
Ya snooze ya loose when you failed to cover the ruse.
Peter Pansbridge. the CBC boy who never grew up and is in charge of the CBCpravda fantasy world.
the talking head crowing climate change
FIRE. THEM .ALL.
…there are 23,100,000 Google results for “climategate” – and exactly one on-air report from the CBC.
I just had to repeat that…because…well…because I really, really, really like hearing the sound of all hell breaking loose. Nice post Kate.
Well done, Kate!
When even the readers of the Guardian are laughing at climate alarmists, something is happening. After hearing about it on here, I went and read George “Moonbat” Monbiot’s attack on Canada the rogue petro-state. Moonbat lived up to the nickname, but the comments were far superior to what I expected. My favorite, from “ytrewq”:
I knew it! I knew they was a thuggish petro-state as soon as I heard they put cheese on chips.
When even the readers of the Guardian are laughing at climate alarmists, something is happening. After hearing about it on here, I went and read George “Moonbat” Monbiot’s attack on Canada the rogue petro-state. Moonbat lived up to the nickname, but the comments were far superior to what I expected. My favorite, from “ytrewq”:
I knew it! I knew they was a thuggish petro-state as soon as I heard they put cheese on chips.
I overhead two priests debating spiritual matters – that proves God doesn’t exist!
And then there is good ole James Hansen’s day.
From the guy who started it all back in 1988.
[A leading scientist acclaimed as the grandfather of global warming has denounced the Copenhagen summit on climate change next week as a farce.]
Translation: The flake known as the guy who hatched the global warming scam has admitted Copenhagen is a farce too.
He is sorry, just wants it all to go away.
Exit question: Who is he more afraid of; The lawyers or his disciples??
Very nicely written.
You say “what Peter Mansbridge had known for days”
My best friend is as left as I am right – he had no idea about these e-mails
So I bet Mansbridge didn’t know
We look at the world through our own filters – our thalami screen out what we don’t want to see
This reminds me a bit of the “fall of communism” — spectacular events may lie just ahead, but will they actually result in the fall of communism?
Or will some cleaned up new-age communists emerge to run the same old house of mirrors in slightly altered garments?
I know atmospheric scientists a lot better than most of you. Do you really think they can all be replaced? Because while only 20% of them were ever zealots, 79% were enablers.
Those that do not believe we are entering a World WAR… read Soros and wakeup
The CBC/ MSM are a conduit for a foreign Country.. Straight up… High treason…
The EU Communists are the enemy…AGW was a fraud, the financial meltdown was phoney.
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/soros52
I heard tonight on CBC’s “As It Happens” an interview with a “Professor” of climate stidies at East Anglia. To be fair our interlocutor
did ask some probing questiions. But they seem to be tame, ready for the pat answer. The “professor” on the other hand was chuck full of ambiguity and nuance. And it occured to me that they had become the deniers.
What strikes me most about the emails (and I cant say I’ve read them all) is blithe and blase manner of them. Yes the new deniers can go on about being real people, imbued with real passions. But it is the dispassionate missives that really scare me. Those that are perfectly happy to do whatever for the sake of the cause.
The Nazis gave us the banality of evil. Is this the banality of academic malfeasance?
*yawn* If eric lawson didn’t know what was going on in the news then maybe he shouldn’t be in the news business.
Disagree with the fire them all…line them up and shoot them for treason against their fellow man
… and Kate writes a bunch of hyperbole to make herself, blogs, and this story look more important than they are. What else is new?
Brilliantly written, Kate, absolutely brilliantly written!
I sense that the general public, who depend upon the mainstream media (MSM) for their news & information, feel like the citizens of East Berlin, kept contained and ignorant by this same media.
We, the “skeptical” bloggers & commenters of the world had been shouting over that wall but the powerful loudspeakers of the MSM had mostly drowned us out. When the occasional voice was heard, it was immediately scorned & ridiculed.
“Might there be a better life in West Berlin? Is democracy & freedom of speech respected over there? No, of course not”, shouted the Gores and Suzukis and their sycophants, “there’s nothing over there but ugly capitalist greed. Stay over here where we will tell you what to think!”
Kate it is a blend of rathergate and the swiftboat but two orders of magnitude larger.
Six months after the second watergate break-in was busted RMN won the greatest POTUS victory ever. Less tha two years later he was arguably the most hated man in America.
This scandal is as you point out only 14 days old. AGW as a cause was/is far more popular than RMN ever was. There are billions of people whi have staked their respectability on the AGW myth. It will take time (years?) for them to recover their dignity and the join the fight against these envirosocialist pied pipers. We need to be determined and relentless in our efforts to see the destruction of the AGW lobby but in doing so we have to respect the legions of peope who fell for the scam with the best of Intentions.
We have a tremendous opportunity to convert billions of people to the conservative/market cause if we play our cards right. Let’s not squander it.
WOW!!!
I hope this doesn’t sound sexist or condescending because its not meant that way but here we have an untrained woman who lives in nowhere Sask (I used to live in Sask so I can say that) and paints motorcycle helmets for a living and raises dogs for fun and we have the best damn seat in the house. When I read Kate’s statements like that above my first reaction is to look at the byline for a name like Steyn or Goldstein or Adler or some other first rate journalist. Kate is as good as any and better than most.
I guess that is why I come to this blog 10 or 15 times a day. All posts are good with some being better than others but NEVER is there a bad one.
We are very lucky that Kate does what she does.
Thank you Kate!!!
In other words bleet and Patrick, ya got nuthin.
It occurs to me that this could be a present day version of the french revolution …
Let them eat carbon
Is KevinB around, I mean sometime, probably not at this ungodly hour? I ask because I’d like to know what our resident Marshall McLuhan guy might have to say about the Mainstream Media and the Message?
Surely McLuhan is the go-to Canadian on this. If not him, who? If not now…
Ick, I put a question-mark at the end of a sentence, and I’m such a snob about that. Time for bed.
Well done, Kate and SDA.
…declarative sentence…
Your signature post, Kate, after all these years or exemplary blogging. Please leave it at the top for a day or two.
I think this post deserves a place on your sidebar Kate.
Well said, and thanks for putting into words what so many of us, that the MSM tries to brand “skeptics and deniers”, wish we could say.
Only one additional request, Kate:
Please don’t stop!
Kate, you just nailed our collective theses to the door of the “Wittenburg church”. Long live freedom!
Hee’s CBC’s response to my complaint regarding this subject. Have at it.
Thank you for your e-mail of November 28 addressed to Vince Carlin, CBC Ombudsman. Since CBC News falls in my remit, perhaps I can reply.
You wrote, in substance, to ask why CBC News had not carried a story concerning the thousands of e-mails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit that had recently ended up on the Internet.
I suppose the short answer is CBC News did carry the story. On CBC News.ca, it was posted on November 26 under the headline, “Hackers skewed climate-change emails: scientists”. I expect we will be carrying more stories about the stolen documents and the fallout from their publication in the days before the opening of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen on December 7.
With the clearer vision afforded by hindsight, we should have noticed the story and picked it up sooner than we did, but its absence is certainly not evidence of partisanship or CBC “suppression” of the story.
To be fair, the story’s significance seemed only gradually to emerge. As I understand it hackers tried to post the stolen e-mails on a scientific website on November 17. By the weekend, climate change skeptics were analyzing and re-posting them, arguing that they demonstrated collusion among climate change researchers in an effort to overstate the case for global warming, a conclusion vigorously disputed by the scientists involved. The growing debate sparked wider attention the following week (I see The New York Times carried the story on November 21, the National Post on November 24, the Toronto Star on November 28 and The Globe and Mail on December 1).
As you might expect, CBC News editors are faced daily with choosing – from among the thousands available in Canada and around the world – the few dozen stories that they feel are the most significant and will be of the greatest interest to Canadians. It is a decision made all the more difficult by the limited resources and time available in our news programs and our Internet pages. Of course, we cannot include all, or even many, of the stories taking place around the country and the world, but thank you for drawing this one to our attention. We will continue to follow it.
Thank you again for your e-mail.
Finally, it is my responsibility to inform you that if you are not satisfied with this response, you may wish to submit the matter for review by the CBC Ombudsman. The Office of the Ombudsman, an independent and impartial body reporting directly to the President, is responsible for evaluating program compliance with the CBC’s journalistic policies. The Ombudsman may be reached by mail at the address shown below, or by fax at (416) 205-2825, or by e-mail at ombudsman@cbc.ca
Sincerely,
Esther Enkin
Executive Editor
CBC News
Box 500, Station “A”,
Toronto, Ontario
M5W 1E6
And as I read this I just had to go to CBC and watch the Mansbridge clip on climategate for myself, “to see if he had.”
Kate, bravo, outstanding! For your series on climategate and for this post. Thank you.
Oh yeah, these newsguys knew about this, they were sitting on the story that was being published in a gazillion blogs as well as the international press. Reminds me of Adscam and how the same news people would titter about what they knew and couldn’t tell about the revelations of the Gomery inquiry. Thanks once again, Ed Morissey (Captain’s Quarters Blog). Gatekeepers indeed — no more.
Clark’s Law: “Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” Highly applicable.
Well done Kate. I stopped getting information from the MSM years ago; I used to listen to TV news about 5 years ago (watched it only occasionally like 11/9/2001) but was getting so fed up with the content that my TV never gets turned to a Canadian news show. Besides, the data transfer rate of a TV news program is so slow that I’d much rather spend the time reading a detailed blog posting and be far more informed after 30 minutes on this.
The whole point of TV news was to be able to get out a story within hours of it happening at most. Those 14 days that the MSM pretended that nothing was going on are probably going to gnaw at unemployed reporters for years as they stand shivering in the soup kitchen line. When we look back at this time a few years from now it may be seen as the month the MSM died and there’s not much they can do to hide their decline.
‘…The Office of the Ombudsman, an independent and impartial body reporting directly to the President…”? President…of the CBC? who the f#ck is the president? who is the president? If the ombudsman is the middleman then I say lose him now, he’s a lackey. I’ll go straight to the “President” from here on in.
Revenge tastes best served cold? It tastes good at any temperature, particularly when it involves correcting insanity.
And then we have the tiresome claim by bleet and others that this was about scientists debating to find the truth. Read the material, idiot boy; this was about scientists finding data which didn’t fit their paradigm and then discussing how to make it fit a predetermined conclusion. They were debating the best way to fool the public.
This attitude fits perfectly with the first environmental science course I took twenty years ago when I first heard about global warming. I had no objection to the theory at that time, but I remember being disturbed by the willingness of the professor to pitch a message at the expense of facts. Sure, there were a few contrary facts, but those were dismissed because it was the “right thing” to do. Smiling, sincere, and lying.
Posted by: Gord Tulk
“Let them eat carbon”
That is a gem Gord.
A as is this post by Kate; A superb stab at the media bourgeoisie. Its time for these media nerds to remove their politically-correct, lily-white hands from their keyboards and onto a shovel so they can remove the shite from their hovels and obtain a dose of reality.
“I overhead two priests debating spiritual matters – that proves God doesn’t exist!” — bleet
A priceless, laugh out loud funny post like that from a troll is just the cherry on top of a great story Kate.
I like the “imprinted penguins” line, just sayin’.
Read the part of red star yesterday. They managed to write a whole article on the Moonbiot non-event and include an insert on the Austrialian government being unable to pass their carbon bill, without mentioning any of the sordid affair. NOT ONE WORD.
bleet – you had less chance of hearing to priests talking than you did of reading (let alone understanding) any of the emails. And the CODE. Son, you are way above your head. Seek help.
Erik Larsen: “So I bet Mansbridge didn’t know.”
I’ll bet he did, Erik. There have been countless letters to the CBC Ombudsman (mine included) over the past few weeks asking why the CBC has been mum on one of the biggest stories of the century — no doubt.
I would imagine that “they” talk at the CBC. I’m pretty sure that I’m-Peter-Mansbridge-and-you’re-not knew all about it, but in his priggish, stuck-up, arrogant, snooty, CBC way, made a conscious decision to say to the rest of us “up yours.”
Ah, the satisfaction of telling him, the same to you, you incompetent nincompoop.
“The real scheme of liberalism is annihilation and substitution, which liberals refer to as evolution.”
“I see a close alliance between Takuan Seiyo’s Meccania, in its juggernaut advance, and Deconstruction’s assault on meaning, which I invoked earlier in the essay. Drawing on Barfield’s insight, I see a close fitment – a pattern of ideological mutual reinforcement – involving recrudescent Darwinism, which has definitely attached itself to the body of establish liberal doctrine; the obsession of empowered liberalism to treat society as an object that its acolytes might manipulate according to their will; the assault on meaning in literary studies, legal scholarship, and history; and finally the cult of sex and violence proffered by popular culture, as visual entertainment. The descent of the last into degraded stultification is appropriately abetted by the insipid flatness of its main technique, computer-generated imagery: all surface without depth. Societies “evolve,” as liberals like to say, implying that resistance to the “change” that they relentlessly push is mere reactionary futility. But a thing that evolves must be essentially the same at the end of the process as at the beginning. The real scheme of liberalism is annihilation and substitution, which liberals refer to as evolution.
Barfield anticipated these developments fifty years ago. It turns out in hindsight, for example, that the case of Lady Chatterley in the British courts was replete with meaning and that blithe acceptance of spiritless Eros would indeed exert a baneful influence on culture. Modern society is as full of idols as it is of celebrities. The celebrities are as hollow and idiotic as idols. Barfield, a champion of meaning and of the plenitude of the word – that most human of our human qualities – deserves a new generation of readers. He has much to teach us.”
…-
“The Other Idol-Breaker: Owen Barfield and the Plenitude of the Word
“In The Twilight of the Idols (1888), Friedrich Nietzsche proposed to teach “how to philosophize with a hammer.” Hammers find their predestined use, according to Nietzsche, in the smashing of idols, by which he meant the assortment of falsehoods and platitudes that constituted, in his view, the shabby existing dominant representation of life and the world. Nietzsche never practiced anything like systematic philosophy – he wrote as he thought, aphoristically and in paragraphs. One must take him unsystematically, too, or rather selectively – because, having atomized all the images, as he supposed himself to have done, and having found nothing behind them, as he convinced himself, the devilish idea that everything is nothing strongly tempted him. He wrote of it under the image of “the abyss.” If the Nietzschean philosophical impulse transmigrated for the good in souls like Oswald Spengler and H. L. Mencken, who were skeptics and iconoclasts, it would regrettably also have done so in souls, if that were the word, like Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Derrida, to whom harsher labels must apply. Spengler and Mencken warned against nihilism; the polysyllabic abolishers of logic and morality taught the faddishly inclined to crave for l’abîme and Das Ungrund. The legion of cipher-minions has been craving thusly, and arrogantly on behalf of everyone else, ever since.” (more)
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4192
I have come to the conclusion that ‘patrick’ is, in reality, Patrick Star.
I have come to the conclusion that ‘patrick’ is, in reality, Patrick Star.
Kate, day by day you’re starting to sound more and more like a young-earth creationist. Please, do yourself a favor and actually try to research the subject matter for a change. You’ll find that most of what you’re repeating is either based on misinterpretations, misquotations, or outright lies. Arguing against AGW is one thing – displaying your ignorance for millions to see is something else entirely.
Hey Kate, love your stuff. Here’s one for you:
HotAir – Boxer: You know what the real issue is in Climategate? E-mail theft
I’ve done a little tribute to this site and to Canada at http://samandimp.wordpress.com. Hope it’s all correct! Got into the Heather issue. All the best, SH
“Going Rogue” with Sarah Palin.
Where’s little Peter? Little Peter Mansbridge, that is.
Little Peter is in front of his warm/cuddly comfy fur CBC teleprompter lip-synching the “CBC News”.
…-
“Sarah Palin fans brave cold to have books signed
NORMAN — A cold wind and temperatures in the low 40s didn’t deter die-hard Sarah Palin fans Wednesday.
Lugging blankets, sleeping bags and folding chairs, supporters began camping out in front of Hastings Books in Norman by mid-afternoon, settling in for a night that threatened temperatures in the 20s and only a slight relief from winds. It’s all to make sure they get the former vice presidential candidate’s autograph today on their copies of “Going Rogue.”
The signings will begin at 7 p.m.
“Not only are we Oklahomans and Americans, but today we are Alaskans,” said Michael Barton of Edmond.”
http://www.newsok.com/sarah-palin-fans-brave-cold-to-have-books-signed/article/3422087?custom_click=masthead_topten
BRAVA, Kate!
I’ve just sent the following to Vince Carlin, the “non-partisan” CBC Ombudsman:
Let me add my voice to the chorus of Canadians who are absolutely disgusted with your organization’s utter failure to carry out its mandate. That it took CBC a couple of weeks to report, in prime time, the CRU scandal is reprehensible—and why CBC News’s audience share is in the sub basement, just where it deserves to be.
From long experience—well over two decades of the CBC’s propaganda and spin, as well as its ridiculous, mewling justifications for its deceit and bias, that wouldn’t fool a 10 year old (how stupid do you think we are?)—I’ve discerned that the CBC is an insult to my intelligence and sense of justice and fair play. (I know, via the internet, that Peter Pansbridge finally allowed a smidgen of reality to burst the CBC’s utopian, self-referential, insulated, partisan bubble.)
I’ve also read Esther Enkins’ ridiculous response to another Canadian who wrote to you about the CRU issue. Her inane babblings are the usual CBC “Blah, Blah, Blah”: really, that the CBC thinks it can serve up complete balderdash, with a straight face, to the paying customers is a supreme insult. (I also note that the CBC responders to audience complaints is constantly changing. I’m not surprised: the constant disconnect from reality and having to spin the truth—I think that’s called lying—over and over must be disconcerting, to say the least.)
I’ll be writing the Conservative government again to protest having to provide funds to an altogether biased and tone deaf organization that has no intention of providing the news straight up—and every intention of treating the citizens of Canada with utter contempt, a trick the CBC has been playing decade after decade.
Shame on all of you.
So much for the MSM editor’s belief system that has the MSM being the font of all public knowledge.
Two priests arguing over God doesn’t cost me a cent of money or my freedom.
Governments carrying on with a green agenda based on lies does, and I’m all for justthinkin’s line of thought at 3:19.
I’ll be calling my local riding again and reminding them if Prentice is sticking with his line of thought my faith in Harper will evaporate totally.
If they can go along with this kind of manipulation by all the big players well what good are they for conservative principals?
I may be wrong but when something is as devious as AGW, a righteous “GO TO HELL” goes so many beautiful straight forward ways and cuts to the chase. That’s what scandals of this magnitude need
not lip-service.
Thanks for all the great work you do Kate.
What annoys me most about CBC and CTV News is theirfocus on pop-culture news.
Tiger Woods getting beat up and a divorce is pop-culture news.
The continued coverage of a couple party crashing the White House is pop-culture news.
Save those stories for ‘e-talk daily’
Now, if the party crashers had been at Rideau Hall, that would be relevant news for Canadians!