Climategate, MSM, and Partisan Pundits

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Unless you're a rock dweller, you've no doubt heard about so-called "Climategate": The hacked e-mails from University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) that prove scientists have manipulated statistics to hide the fact that global warming is a hoax.
 
Or, a series of catty e-mails among colleagues, with no bearing whatsoever on the scientific reality of catastrophic climate change.
 
Like many things, it depends on who you ask—which makes it an interesting case study in news coverage.
 
Not surprisingly, partisan publications interpreted the information disparately. A search of the liberal Nation brought up exactly one mention, in a story about George Will, in which it was dismissed as a "manufactured scandal." The conservative Weekly Standard, meanwhile, declared, "The climate campaign is having its Emperor's New Clothes moment" in a magazine cover story, and the National Review crowed, "The alarmists recognize full well what threat these affirmations pose...the substance dooms them."
 
This kind of rhetoric is to be expected from the partisan press. But what about the MSM, the journalistic middle-ground where objectivity, if not always achieved, is at least intended?
 
The New York Times' seasoned ombudsman, Clark Hoyt, wrote a piece in the Sunday paper examining this very balancing act. He responded to a cadre of reader complaints that the paper deliberately downplayed the shocking news (of course, the Times is routinely accused of liberal bias).
 
Hoyt, though known to often side with readers, concluded that such accusations were unfounded because 1) The Times did give the story fair play, with a front page story and several subsequent follow-ups, and 2) The story itself didn't warrant alarmist coverage, because it didn't have the substance to cause alarm.
 
The reality: There is ample evidence that many of the most damning tidbits in the e-mails—such as the scientist who claimed he played a "trick" with the numbers to inflate climate change trends—were taken out of context. The bulk of the e-mails are just scientists bickering and bitching about skeptics. And even if they did skew their numbers, there are myriad other scientists and organizations that have drawn very similar conclusions about global warming. This means their deception would have to be part of one massive worldwide conspiracy.
 
This isn't to say the e-mails don't raise valid questions about scientific inquiry. Nor is it an attack on the right—it's very likely the left would have heightened their rhetoric and righteousness if the tables were turned.
 
But if a story is clearly skewed one way or another, isn't it the responsibility of the mainstream press to present the truth, whatever side it happens to support? Or are they obligated to offer information to appease all sides equally? It's hard to justify the latter. If readers just want to have their opinions validated, they already have plenty of options to do so. "Climategate" proves that the relevance of a story is often in the mind of the beholder. It's the media's job to ignore the inevitable cries of foul play from the sidelines, dig for the true story, and then stick to the facts.
 
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