Yesterday on Fox News’ The Five, a segment was devoted to discussing whether or not Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign was already over. The reason: he’d “admitted” to believing in evolution and climate change. This morning, Poynter posted a great essay about how objective journalists can handle stories about Huntsman and Rick Perry. The problem, the essay finds, is that those stories necessitate reporting that scientists do, in an overwhelming majority, believe in man-made climate change and that makes the journalist appear to be biased against conservatives.

Wait, what? Since when did reporting a fact of science become political?

The conventional wisdom from many TV pundits on the latest info dump from WikiLeaks was that, while they were potentially embarrassing, there was mostly nothing that people didn’t already know. The same can be said of “FoxLeaks,” the title given by Media Matters to a recent release of leaked internal memos from Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon to staffers. Last week’s published memo demonstrated how he directed coverage of the health care debate; today, leaked memo focused on the Global Warming debate. Get ready…he wanted it to reported with skepticism. Shocking!

In a blow to global warming deniers everywhere, an official review released today has cleared all the Climategate scientists from charges of dishonesty. Turns out what they were guilty of was not sharing enough.

Rachel Maddow is uncovering a ‘scandalous’ trend. On Thursday, after an investigation into James O’Keefe’s (unedited) ACORN tapes the California Attorney General released a statement saying “that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality.” Maddow draws some comparisons to another recent scandal.

In the debate on global climate change, Global Warming proponents may have just gotten their favorite closing argument back. The Associated Press is reporting that a British panel, made up of the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee, has completed an investigation today that clears the Climategate scientists of nearly all wrongdoing and validated their initial findings.

President Obama went to Las Vegas today. (How many people do you think have already made the joke ‘a little less conversation, a little more action please’?) While out there he discussed, among other things, the recent extreme weather conditions across the country. No matter what some parts of the conservative party would have you believe, says Obama, climate change is real.

If this is the beginning of some sort of media match between Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow, then I think Maddow won the first round. To begin, it looks like Glenn Beck is in trouble again for not remembering what he himself has said. This time with Rachel Maddow. Also, he called her a liar. She did not take kindly to either. Let the evisceration begin.

It appears that the relentless coverage of the Climategate scandal may have had some effect. Despite the record low temperatures — and regardless of what they may actually signify — fewer people believe that extreme weather conditions are the result of global warming than did just two years ago.

World Net Daily correspondent and conservative radio host Lester Kinsolving, with an assist from NBC’s Mike Viqueira, threw more hilariously loaded questions at Robert Gibbs from behind his signature shotgun mic. He touched on some subjects sure to tickle the sensibilities of the birther/global warming denier/dittohead set when he asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs why it was so cold out, did the President visit the hospital that Rush Limbaugh stayed in in Hawaii, and…just what hospital was the President born in?

Is Drudge warming up to the idea of climate change? After spending last month heralding the leaked Climategate emails and the subsequent uproar over the Copenhagen summit, Drudge has been devoting some significant space to extreme weather conditions taking place around the globe. So much so he’s devoted the entire upper left section to it!

2009 has been a year of controversies. Some of them were big, like Climategate. Some of them were not very big, but were nevertheless blown up by blogs and cable news, like Jackass-gate, when President Obama referred to Kanye West as a “Jackass.” Many were united by that ever-persistent “-gate” suffix. In this slideshow, Mediaite fondly looks back on a year of -gates (and wonders if it’s time to give the “-gate” suffix a rest):

Here’s an interesting tidbit buried part way through Newsweek’s interview with Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger. In the process of describing how one of the requirements of her job is to keep an eye on future problems, which lead to a description of this scenario, perhaps call it Climategate, The War Games?

Jesse Ventura‘s TruTV show Conspiracy Theory got contemporary last night when it covered two of today’s most-debated topics: global warming and Climategate. Last week, the show proved that it wouldn’t shy from controversy by taking on 9/11 conspiracy theories. But Ventura had already been on the record as a 9/11 skeptic before the show. With his unique take on global warming, Ventura takes it up a notch:

Confused about what exactly is going on in Copenhagen this week? Uncertain who’s there to discuss what? Jon Stewart boils it down to its most essential parts: it’s the World of Warmcraft. Our ability to live (on land) is what’s at stake! Unless you are a critic, in which case this may be the biggest hoax perpetrated on mankind (after the myth of the female orgasm). Stewart tries to sort it all out.

Yesterday, Representative Joe Barton, known to his critics as “Smokey Joe” for his staunchly free-market, anti-regulation stance on corporate pollution, went on C-SPAN to discuss … wait for it … Climategate. The Climategate affair, and the public skepticism about man-made global warming that it has helped produce, have to be a small triumph for a man who has been a staunch skeptic since before it was fashionable.

You’ve no doubt heard the story by now: hackers recently got hold of a bunch of emails from some climate scientists and the University of Anglia. So now some have decided these emails are the smoking gun to some grand global warming conspiracy, cooked up just for sport. And the controversy broke just in time for the Copenhagen summit! So who are the Winners and Losers of the Climategate scuttlebutt? It involves Sarah Palin, Tiger Woods and, of course, Copenhagen. Find out more inside!

In honor of Stossel’s new show, or Climategate, or maybe the polar bears, Stossel brought along his own green phone as a companion piece to Beck’s red phone White House phone. The green phone is apparently for Al Gore. Combined they are the Santa hotline! Anyway, after watching the same climate change video that was shown to attendees in Cophenhagen, Beck pondered whether the commercial is in fact, fear mongering! Eeegads, imagine that. Are there also chalkboards in Cophenhagen?

Bad news, bloggers: according to a Harvard Business Review columnist, controversy is going to be a less and less valuable news product in the years to come. Umair Haque writes that “One of the new competencies the news media is going to have manage is opinion arbitrage. In an era of media production devolved to the masses, everyone can finally express their opinion. So publishers will have to learn to, to put it crudely, buy opinion low and sell it high.” What does that mean, exactly?

The Climategate affair continues to move from fringe Internet cause to mainstream debate. Case in point: CNN is talking about it more and more. The network is often accused of waffling in its reporting and failing to come to strong conclusion. But their latest piece on the hackers behind Climategate was anything but waffly: it was, in the lingo of climate change skeptics, ‘warmist,’ all but putting its foot down and calling global warming an undisputed fact:

Today Glenn Beck took issue with how quickly the Dems are attempting to ram the health care bill down the throats of Congress and by extension, America and by extension every other conspiracy theory currently plaguing the media: “Don’t think, don’t ask, don’t wait another second! CALL NOW!”

the Washington Post has opted to run another Sarah Palin op-ed piece, this one about Climategate. The piece is a re-working of something Palin posted on her Facebook page last week and the Post is apparently drawing the ire of some readers who feel it’s just a clear grab for traffic.

We’re 100% sure this story is going to get a little complicated.

Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart highlighted a graphic on Fox & Friends relating to global warming and, loosely, Climategate. But the numbers didn’t add up – or did they?

In preparation for President Obama’s upcoming visit to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, environmental activist group Greenpeace and tcktcktck.org have rolled out an ad campaign that has some chilling elements. While the right constantly accuses the President of apologizing now, Greenpeace predicts Obama will be sorry in 2020 if he doesn’t save the world in Copenhagen.

Maybe the only thing not up for debate with regards to Climategate is that it is threatening to derail the global climate summit that begins today in Copenhagen. The timing of the hacking and the revelations coming just weeks before the summit could not have been more spectacular or damaging. So who was responsible? One high ranking official is pointing a finger at the Russians.

Climategate has slowly but steadily bubbled up from fringe meme on the Internet to hot-button political and scientific cause. Do a set of emails from a hacked climate research server show that global warming is a hoax? Paul Krugman contends that there was “not a single smoking gun” to Climategate, and that the global warming skeptics using the hacked emails as evidence need to brush up on their science.