New York Times' climate change reporter Andrew Revkin is taking a buyout from his employer after a tough year, the Columbia Journalism Review's website (12/14/09) reports. Revkin, whom CJR's Christine Russell describes as "one of the most influential and respected reporters on the environment," says that 2009 "has been the hardest year I’ve experienced on this beat"--in part because

Revkin has increasingly found himself--and his paper’s coverage--the target of critics on both the right and the left, particularly in the often vitriolic blogosphere. He described himself as "an advocate for scientific reality," not for either side of the debate.

"The right," in this sense, means people who dispute the idea that humans are causing global climate change, whereas "the left" means people who affirm that we are--in other words, people who believe in scientific reality. Revkin's willingness to pretend that science is not on one side of the debate explains a lot of the criticism he's taken lately from pro-science bloggers.

The New York Times' reporter on the climate beat, Andrew Revkin, had a front-page story this weekend (11/20/09) detailing the contents of climate scientists' private emails discussing global warming. Predictably, the emails are being taken out of context by climate change deniers--but more interesting to me is the fact that the focus is on the content of the emails, not on the fact that they were illegally obtained.

That's not the way corporate media handled the illegally taped cell phone call between Newt Gingrich, John Boehner and other Republican congressmembers in which Gingrich violated the terms of a ethics sanction by strategizing about how to minimize the charges against him. In that case, they focused on the illegality of the taping--and the unauthorized leaking of the tape by Rep. Jim McDermott (D.-Wash.).

That's also not how the press handled the case of  Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Michael Gallagher, who illegally listened to voicemails at the Chiquita corporation in pursuit of a series of stories that charged the company with involvement in bribery, fraud and the abuse of workers. Again, the wrongdoing that was considered newsworthy was the reporter's, not the target of his investigation.

It's hard to imagine what ethical code would tell journalists to ignore information about corporate skullduggery or congressional ethics violations if it was obtained through illicit means, but if it concerns the academic politics of climate scientists--dig in!

Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias (2/25/09) hits the Washington Post for "standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is"--and then spreads some of the blame around:

Meanwhile, one of the Post's main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is the New York Times. So faced with a humiliating abrogation of basic responsibilities by its competitor, does the Times take the opportunity to pour some salt in the wounds? No! Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false-equivalence article painting Will with the same brush as Al Gore. Will's sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore's sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in the New York Times. Hm.

See Extra!: "Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias" (11-12/04) by Jules Boykoff and Maxwell Boykoff.