Ten years ago, in mid-November of 2009, someone hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, and began sharing them with various climate blogs. From there, unscrupulous deniers took quotes out of context, truncated them, or otherwise misrepresented the years of scientific correspondence to allege wrongdoing. BBC Four is running a program on ‘Climategate’ this week, and we also expect deniers to dust off their lies on the debacle too.
One of the first people to pull the story out of the blogs and into the mainstream was James Delingpole, who recently described the experience in a Spectator column headlined “My finest hour.”
Delingpole writes how he’s “not altogether sure it was worth it” to get the “scoop that will make his name” that “every journalist dreams of,” because “for every ardent fan it made me it probably lost me a couple more.”
He describes how his dream-come-true scoop “dropped into [his] lap” when he saw it on Watts Up With That (so it wasn’t a scoop at all because it was already public...but whatever). Delingpole describes how little journalism he actually did before publishing, in that “All [he] did was top, tail, adapt it and popularise it by giving it a bit of snark, context and spin. Then I nicked the title from a commenter… Et voilà! Climategate was born.”
Delingpole then describes how even though subsequent investigations cleared the scientists of any malfeasance, and that the whole ordeal “did not offer definitive proof that the man-made climate scare is fabricated,” Climategate somehow “offered the first solid proof that the scientific establishment wasn’t being altogether honest about man-made global warming.”
But we need to back up just a second and point out just how sad it is that this is what Delingpole considers his greatest accomplishment. He took a blog post, added “snark, context and spin,” attached the most obvious scandal-prefix-gate (something he admits he didn’t even think of himself) and that’s....it.
Did he, as a supposed journalist, fact check the claims before publishing them? No. Did he talk to a source to secure what he falsely describes as a scoop? Nope! The identity of the hacker who published the emails remains unknown (though there are some startling similarities to a more recent email hacking scandal).
All Delingpole did was give a lie a bigger platform.
But considering that he has gone on to write for the white nationalist Breitbart, where he defends white nationalist Tommy Robinson, while attacking and sexualizing a child, and in his own words regarding a different time he pulled shoddy work from a climate denial blog, “lazily helped promulgate a lie,” something he does so regularly even regulators rule that his fake news is so stupid that no one could believe was fact, not opinion, he’s probably right.
Given that his whole schtick is to lift lies out of the gutters of the internet and try and inject them into the mainstream, Climategate was likely his finest hour.
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