Why the MSM Cannot Possibly Report on ClimateGate

The Anchoress notes what I have been saying ... from another angle:

The AGW/Climate Change question became a rigorous boondoggle that got out of control not because the scientist who first suggested a connection between human carbon emission and a change in climate were bad people, or that the question was not worth asking, but because bad people then took the uncertain hypothesis, put it on media-fueled steroids, demonized anyone who disagreed with them, made it political -so much so that even the scientists got caught up in the good/bad, smart/stupid, Gore/Bush, Left/Right identifiers- and found real power there; they allowed the AGW movement to become the dubious centering pole upholding the giant circus tent of their worldviews.

As such, it is not permitted to be shaken. Shake the centering pole, and everything could come tumbling down: Oh. My. Gawd! If the Gore-doubters were right about this, what else might they be right about? And if they’re all stupid, and I’m smart, but they’re right and I’m wrong . . .

Implosion.

If the true-believers of AGW got this wrong, and they’d attached it to all of their politics, all of their hate, all of their superiority, then everything is in a free-fall.

And this is why the mainstream media cannot possibly report on Climategate until they have an acceptable counter-narrative that they can haul out in order to either debunk the story or soften its edges, even as they break the news.

The press, who spent a huge portion of their credibility convincing America that President Bush was a “liar” and a “power-abuser” and an “arrogant chump who made the world (read Chirac and Schroeder) hate us” and then spent the balance of their capital carrying into office a man whose every utterance comes with an expiration date, who seems to have very quickly abused his power and has treated our traditional allies (who were partnering well with the United States from 2004-on) with contempt or disinterest. The press really cannot afford to admit that almost nothing they have said in the past 9 years has escaped ideological or political framing to suit their agenda. Implode, they will.

So the story must not be told, until it can be told from their self-protective angle which is undoubtedly under development as you read this.

This reminds me of Jon Stewart, on the Daily Show, back when Iraq had its first successful election -when even the press could not snarl too much at the pictures of women in hijab pointing their purple fingers in the air as they grinned. “What if Bush was right,” Stewart mused, with a horrified expression.

“What if Bush – the president, ours – has been right about [Iraq] all along? I feel like my world view will not sustain itself and I may – and, again, I don’t know if I can physically do this – implode.”

There is an anvil-heavy irony to all of this. Part of the smart/stupid, left/right narrative was built on the fantastic strawman that the AGW-doubters on the right were “enemies of science,” that first they were not allowing science to use human embryos for experimentation, and now they were daring to doubt the most imperative scientific advice in the history of mankind.

But if the excesses of the weather-sciences are about be discredited to the degree that -as some worry- may “bring all science into dispute”, then that harm comes not from the right, who simply dared to question, but solely from the left, who refused to permit questions, openness, transparency.

Too true. Global warming skeptics were treated either as oil industry shills and liars or deluded nuts; likened to Nazi sympathizers as global warming "deniers." Even now, the media has to point out that Bush opposed the Kyoto treaty and the global warming movement and praising Obama for taking the opposite position. How can they now report that global warming is in dispute while continuing to support the Obama position on Copenhagen? It's obvious that they can't report both the scandal and support Obama on global warming. The press must support Obama and ClimateGate becomes a non-story. To do otherwise would destroy their entire worldview.