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When holier-than-thou New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin decided not to publish e-mails that expose climate scientists as frauds because they were obtained illegally, Times watchers (including this one) rightly cried "Hypocrisy!" One recent and one distant case of the newspaper rejecting Revkin's new standard of journalistic ethics leapt to mind.
But a far better example of the paper's hypocrisy has escaped notice -- until now. In May 1994, the Times published a series of stories about the tobacco industry that were based on the pre-Internet equivalent of leaked e-mails. The paper's coverage later led to a book by reporter Philip J. Hilts titled Smokescreen: The Truth Behind The Tobacco Industry Cover-up. The circumstances surrounding the tobacco industry then and the climate science community now are remarkably similar, yet the Times reached exact opposite conclusions about how to cover the news. This time Revkin and the paper, as well as much of the mainstream media, have created a smokescreen to protect fraudulent scientists whose agenda they support. Tobacco under fire Democrats began targeting the tobacco industry after Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., led the charge as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. Waxman's probe led to a dramatic April 14, 1994 hearing where top executives from tobacco companies swore under oath that nicotine is not addictive. At about the same time, a whistleblower contacted Hilts and handed over internal memorandums that proved the Brown & Williamson tobacco company had known the health dangers of tobacco for decades. Like "hide the decline" from the hacked global warming e-mails, the Brown & Williamson documents had a memorable money quote: "Moreover, nicotine is addictive. ... We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug." Hilts described the revelations in an interview with PBS for its "Smoke In The Eye" special: Once we got these papers in hand, it became very clear that they knew a lot very early on, that they were deliberately hiding things, and that they were deliberately trying to keep them out of court and so on -- at the same time saying these things were not true, saying cigarettes are not addictive, and yet they have their own studies which show how addictive it is and exactly how the addiction works and so on. ... They did all kinds of studies on the hazards of cigarettes and inhalation of tobacco and so on and found a lot of problems. Well, we never heard about this, but they knew it all early on. Brown & Williamson, along with the rest of the tobacco industry, understandably wanted to quash publicity of the documents. The company convinced a judge in tobacco-friendly Kentucky to impose an injunction against their release because Merrill Williams, a temporary paralegal assigned to Brown & Williamson, allegedly stole them. The company felt compelled to fight release of the documents. "They've been hiding this for years," Hilts told PBS. "It would make them lose case after case in court." But the Times, motivated by a commitment to journalistic integrity and the First Amendment, defied the injunction and published its stories. "Oddly enough there were virtually no legal concerns at the Times," Hilts said, adding that "all the way along, the lawyers ... were very supportive. They really wanted to see the stories in the paper." Hilts criticized ABC for not reporting on the documents even though the network had them before he did. "Lawyers for the entertainment business are more skittish, are more difficult," he told PBS, "and in fact they get involved in the news more, probably more than they should. ... I don't think, in newspapers, reporters would put up with that." Hot global warming e-mails Print reporters without links to the entertainment industry may well be more committed to battling media lawyers in order to break major news, but they clearly are not immune to self-censorship. Unlike Hilts, Revkin chose not to post the global warming e-mails. His defense: "The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye." If Hilts and other journalists had neglected their duty like Revkin and company are in covering "ClimateGate," the tobacco industry never would have been forced to settle with state prosecutors in 1998 and might not have been subjected to federal regulation this year. Michael Moore, the former Mississippi attorney general who led the legal fight against the tobacco industry in the 1990s, called the Brown & Williamson papers "probably still the most damming documents ever produced against the industry." Hilts said they "probably are the single-most important pieces of paper in the history of tobacco versus public health." The global warming e-mails revealed last week are just as significant. "This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud," climate expert Patrick Michaels said. Even British writer and environmental activist George Monbiot acknowledged that the e-mails are a "major blow" and urged Phil Jones, the head of the climate research unit that was hacked, to resign. The timing of the climate e-mail hacking also is reminiscent of the tobacco timeline in 1994 -- and thus equally newsworthy. Just as whistleblowers started pushing documents into the media while the Food and Drug Administration and Congress weighed tobacco regulation, the global warming e-mails were posted online days before world leaders gather in Copenhagen next month to ponder draconian rules to limit carbon dioxide emissions. And as with the tobacco documents, the global warming e-mails focus on scientific research. "These behind-the-scenes discussions among leading global-warming exponents are remarkable both in their candor and in their sheer contempt for scientific objectivity," Rochester Institute of Technology professor Ivan Kenneally wrote in The New Atlantis. "There can be little doubt after even a casual perusal that the scientific case for global warming and the policy that springs from it are based upon a volatile combination of political ideology, unapologetic mendacity and simmering contempt for even the best-intentioned disagreement." It's the news judgment, stupid The hacking angle to ClimateGate is a legitimate one to pursue, but it is not the most important angle. The appropriate response is for journalists at The New York Times and elsewhere to behave as they did after Hilts exposed the stolen tobacco documents in 1994. "We had more papers after that," Hilts said. "We went around and found more stuff. More people started coming out of the woodwork and so on. So it was a pivotal moment." Fourteen years ago, the Times scolded CBS for self-censorship when it decided to spike an interview with tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, who later became the central character in the 1999 movie "The Insider." The network later reversed course and aired the interview. Hopefully Andrew Revkin and the Times will redeem themselves and do likewise by giving the global warming e-mails the scrutiny they deserve. (Author's note: I covered the 1994 tobacco debate for Congressional Quarterly and attended the game-changing hearings with Hilts. Thanks to blogger James Joyner for jogging my memory.) ------------------------- K. Daniel Glover is the online communications strategist for AIM for Accuracy In Media. He has worked as an editor, writer and new media specialist in the Washington area since 1991, spending most of that time at National Journal and Congressional Quarterly. Trackback(0)
Comments (4)
  written by Bondservant1958, November 27, 2009
For most of this week I like most minded people have been completely absorbed by the revelations coming from the e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at The University of East Anglia. Given the lack of reporting from the “trusted” alphabet soup of news organizations, ABC,CBS,CNN,BBC we have ourselves read the e-mails and inspected the notes in the code. My understanding is that the CRU headed by Dr Jones supplied the data in their possession to the United Nations IPCC to support the UN goal of implementing Cap and Trade legislation on the whole world in order to combat a man made contribution to the destruction of the world. A “if we do not act quickly there is no hope scenario” much like the financial bailouts No Time to Think Trust Us This is TOO BIG TO FAIL! Trust is what the e-mails from the CRU speak to and manifest. How can I trust the data used to create the theory that Global Warming was man made and not influenced more by an object 93 million miles away that constitutes 99% of the ma*s of the solar system and in which we live, in its “atmospheric influence”, recognizing that it only takes 8 min for the warm to reach us. All we ever asked for was Show Us the Math!, well we have seen the math and we have seen collusion, and we have seen stifling of criticism or inspection, and we have seen the trick of adding real temps where your code fails so that anyone else that has records from 1961 on cannot refute your algorithm, and we have seen willful and criminal misuse of US taxpayers money (Roger’s missed trip and all the stuff you did not buy that US hardworking and suffering taxpayers paid for through the NOAA), and we have seen the deliberate destruction of evidence in the face of Freedom of Information Act requests. I am more concerned about what we have not seen. I have not seen or heard a peep from Al Gore. I still see the President of the United States prepared to agree to putting a greater burden on the US taxpayer in the now unfounded belief that somehow man was responsible for this last period of warming that certainly ended more than 10YEARS AGO! Hide the decline my great-mother! I as a law abiding tax paying citizen of the United States Demand a Federal Investigation of this matter Climategate!
 written by jennifer graham, November 27, 2009 Virtually all scientists agree that the Earth has warmed a small amount since the year 1000 or, if you choose, since 1850, when instrumented temperature records became reasonably accurate and distributed in key areas of the world. An increasing number believe that any warming is so small it is indistinguishable from the noise in the environmenal data sets, and that the data have not been properly adjusted for such things as urban heat island effects (are the city temps warmer than the suburbs where you live? Has the city grown since 1850? Have the runways increased near the temp gage at your airport since 1920?), and instrument calibration. This is particularly true of the global data set, even though "urbanization has caused regional increases in temperature that exceed those measured on a global scale, leading to urban heat islands as much as 12°C hotter than their surroundings". Most scientists agree that warming is better than cooling and many believe CO2 provides important enhancements for forests and agriculture, even while also believing we should not be fouling our nest. Our essay makes every effort to present the true science of climate change. When the news broke of the Arctic ice being at its 30 year low in 2007, the same source (U. of Illinois) reported the Antarctic at its record high, but this was not reported in the media. To show the imbalance, as one reads in the popular press, we have created a companion site that presents the evidence for global cooling, just as most newspapers and alarmists present only the science that supports warming. There are many reasons to be cautious about accepting CO2 as the causative agent if there really is warming. This is highlighted by 2 papers published in March 2008. Scafetta and West showed that up to 69% of observed warming is from the sun and Ramanathan and Carmichael show that soot has 60% of the warming power of CO2. They claim both factors are underappreciated by IPCC. Many scientists believe the temperature changes are more dependent on the sun than CO2, similar to the relationship in your home with your furnace. The soot may well explain much of the Arctic melting, as it has recently for Asian glaciers.
 written by harleyrider1978, November 27, 2009
SECOND HAND SMOKE IS A JOKE. Ask the anti-tobacco folks to tell you what truly is in second hand smoke...when it burns from the coal its oxygenated and everything is burned and turned into water vapor..................thats right water..........you ever burned leaves in the fall...know how the heavy smoke bellows off.......thats the organic material releasing the moisture in the leaves the greener the leaves/organic material the more smoke thats made......thats why second hand smoke is cla*sified as a cla*s 3 irritant by osha and epa as of 2006........after that time EPA decided to change the listing of shs as a carcinogen for political reasons.......because it contained a trace amount of 6 chemicals so small even sophisticated scientific equipment can hardly detect it ........they didnt however use the normal dose makes the poison computation when they made this political decision. However osha still maintains shs/ets as an irritant only and maintains the dose makes the poison position.......as osha is in charge of indoor air quality its decisions are based on science not political agendas as epa's is. We can see this is true after a federal judge threw out the epa's study on shs as junk science......... Wednesday, March 12, 2008 British Medical Journal & WHO conclude secondhand smoke "health hazard" claims are greatly exaggerated The BMJ published report at:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7398/1057 concludes that "The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality. The a*sociation between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer are considerably weaker than generally believed." What makes this study so significant is that it took place over a 39 year period, and studied the results of non-smokers who lived with smokers..... meaning these non-smokers were exposed to secondhand smoke up to 24 hours per day; 365 days per year for 39 years. And there was still no relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality. In light of the damage to business, jobs, and the economy from smoking bans the BMJ report should be revisited by lawmakers as a reference tool and justification to repeal the now unnecessary and very damaging smoking ban laws. Also significant is the World Health Organization (WHO) study: Pa*sive smoking doesn't cause cancer-official By Victoria Macdonald, Health Correspondent " The results are consistent with their being no additional risk for a person living or working with a smoker and could be consistent with pa*sive smoke having a protective effect against lung cancer. The summary, seen by The Telegraph, also states: 'There was no a*sociation between lung cancer risk and ETS exposure during childhood.' " And if lawmakers need additional real world data to further highlight the need to eliminate these onerous and arbitrary laws, air quality testing by Johns Hopkins University proves that secondhand smoke is up to 25,000 times SAFER than occupational (OSHA) workplace regulations. The Chemistry of Secondary Smoke About 94% of secondary smoke is composed of water vapor and ordinary air with a slight excess of carbon dioxide. Another 3 % is carbon monoxide. The last 3 % contains the rest of the 4,000 or so chemicals supposedly to be found in smoke… but found, obviously, in very small quantities if at all.This is because most of the a*sumed chemicals have never actually been found in secondhand smoke. (1989 Report of the Surgeon General p. 80). Most of these chemicals can only be found in quantities measured in nanograms, picograms and femtograms. Many cannot even be detected in these amounts: their presence is simply theorized rather than measured. To bring those quantities into a real world perspective, take a saltshaker and shake out a few grains of salt. A single grain of that salt will weigh in the ballpark of 100 million picograms! (Allen Blackman. Chemistry Magazine 10/08/01). - (Excerpted from "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains" with permission of the author.) The Myth of the Smoking Ban ‘Miracle’ Restrictions on smoking around the world are claimed to have had a dramatic effect on heart attack rates. It's not true. http://www.spiked-online.com/i...icle/7451/ As for secondhand smoke in the air, OSHA has stated outright that: "Field studies of environmental tobacco smoke indicate that under normal conditions, the components in tobacco smoke are diluted below existing Permissible Exposure Levels (PELS.) as referenced in the Air Contaminant Standard (29 CFR 1910.1000)...It would be very rare to find a workplace with so much smoking that any individual PEL would be exceeded." -Letter From Greg Watchman, Acting Sec'y, OSHA, To Leroy J Pletten, PHD, July 8, 1997 -harleyrider1978
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The data are in the faces of Man-Made Climate Change supporters and they still refuse to acknowledge the evidence.
These same scientists threatened my job with the US Geological Survey when trying to publish a study showing with higher confidence that global temperature changes were natural and caused solely by Earth's physical processes. Additionally, these same scientists would not discuss or refute the science and facts presented. Instead, they took two days to personally insult and attack me.
I always knew that when man-made global climate change was shown as insignificant that people would lose faith, note the word "FAITH", in science. But this event and exposure is by far worse for the science community; but "Truth is the daughter of Time (Francis Bacon)".
Several USGS scientists got fired for the same thing when discussing data manipulation for models developed for the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. But no outcry and defense for those scientists?
IF you see no problem with this and not wondering if the public has been misled by these scientists, then you are not scientists, you're in denial, and you stand for no moral principles.
On 25 November 2009 at 12:15 PM, I tried to post comments on RealClimate.org concerning this matter. That website refused the posts because they know me; another attempt to silence objective parties and since they were the ones that threatened my job.....
Now, Al Gore PUBLICLY states Mantle temperatures are MILLIONS of DEGREES. The man doesn't have the morality, decency, and/or courage to publicly admit he was WRONG. SO WHY SHOULD these scientists admit they are wrong? They can't, because if they do, the gig is up.