Back in June of ’10, CNN announced Spitzer, the disgraced/rehabbed former governor and New York Democrat, would be joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist Kathleen Parker – a Washington Post columnist and member of The Washington Post Writers Group – for a new program called “Parker Spitzer.” That announcement was made by CNN president Jon Klein – who, himself, was given the hook before the show actually debuted.
The show did poorly in the ratings; CNN cut bait on Parker in late February – because low ratings are always the chick’s fault in the news biz – and gave Spitzer his own show, called “In the Arena.” Which, on Wednesday became Out of Time.
I wrote a number of post about Climategate. After this story broke there were other “gates” that appeared, including “Amazon-gate” and “Africa-gate”. Both those stories, written by one Johnathan Leake, have been retracted. I am a skeptic of the alarmist, dooms-day wing of AGW climate consensus, and have written more than a few bits on this blog expressing my views. I searched my blog and couldn’t find any post where I mentioned either of these stories, but just the same, I think it is important to acknowledge and weed out journalistic fraud; what would, in this case, appear to be sloppy / misleading reporting, taking advantage of a dust-up in the climate science community, all for the purposes of selling news copy.
To me, this is no different than the incredibly sloppy / stupid journalistic rants of one Jason Leopold, who in 2006, fabricated a story that sources in Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s office, and those inside the White House were telling him of the imminent indictment of Karl Rove in the Valerie Plame fiasco. Now, if he claimed to have had one source, and the one source turned out to be wrong, then you could say that the source was simply mistaken, or misunderstood. But Leopold wrote that he had several. Leopold was so sure that Rove was the perp, that he fabricated the story. Even though he lied about having sources, created them out of thin air, if Rove had been indicted, Leopold would have been considered the first to break the story and would have been greeted with heeps of praise from the whole industry. He would have probably won the Pulitzer, and no one would have been the wiser.
Anyway, hats off to RealClimate for not dropping the blatant dishonesty of Leake and exposing it.
News Critique, Radio / TV, Stupidity / Satire | Sonicfrog June 23, 2010 | 
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