Ignorance of the Journalists

“I tell you I have been in the editorial business going on fourteen years, and it is the first time I ever heard of a man's having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper.”
- Mark Twain, How I Edited an Agricultural Paper Once

Last week the Guardian broke a story that had been in the blogosphere for at least two years:

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced

It is interesting that the “evidence” the Guardian relies on is the email discussion by CRU scientists that the non-CRU researcher responsible for the data “screwed up”. The actual argument for the screw up is in this 2007 paper written by Douglas Keenan. Sans Keenan’s paper, the email exchange is meaningless. But the Guardian didn’t give any credence to Keenan’s thesis until the “establishment” scientists were shown, via the climategate emails, to have done so. Keenan’s paper speaks for itself, but the Guardian journalists do not exhibit any ability to make their own independent judgment. Now that they can’t trust the establishment, where will the Guardian go for critical analysis?

RELATED:

The march of the poodles. Steyn notes the failure of journalism in the climate debate. The point I'm trying to make above is that failure is largely due to the ignorance of the J-school types who must rely on others for their critical thinking. Considering the liberal bent of their training, it is not surprising these journalist tend to trust the views of their liberal ("establishment") climate scientists - especially when opposing views are labeled heretical by the same establishment.

Cross-posted at Anatreptic