Media Not Excited Anymore About Debunked Climategate Scandal

Last week, five independent investigations cleared the scientists involved in the Climategate scandal from allegations that they had tampered with their research in order to prove global warming. The verdict is a major victory for environmentalists and a wake up call for climate change skeptics. CNN’s Howard Kurtz, however, notes a disparity between the amount of coverage Climategate received when the controversy first broke last year and the amount of media attention it’s getting now.

In a brief segment yesterday with The Wrap‘s Sharon Waxman (video below), Kurtz wondered why the people who jumped on the “scandal” when it broke (Glenn Beck for example) have yet to revisit the debate now that the integrity of the climate research has been confirmed:

Glenn Beck didn’t report on this at all. Last fall, when the e-mails were leaked, he called global warming a big hoax and he said, ‘Why has no network covered this global warming fix?’ Why has Glenn Beck and others not revisited it?

Waxman argued that, sad and wrong as it is, the complexity of the investigations’ findings (in which the scientists didn’t tamper with evidence but were simple overly cautious and protective with their data) coupled with the politicization of the global warming debate make for confusing headlines and, consequently, don’t inspire the same media fervor.

But as Steve Benen from the Washington Monthly points outs, this media discrepancy with Climategate is indicative of a wider trend in media reporting:

This is, unfortunately, quite common. The right erupts with anger, the media treats the “controversy” as a legitimate story, and the public hears all about it. We eventually learn that the story was nonsense, but at that point, the media has lost all interest.

In other words, the media loves a scandal, and Climategate got a lot of media attention initially because it was so pertinent to a heavily politicized issue. But now that the controversy is over, the media has mostly lost interest. It’s a sad outcome, though not particularly surprising.