Shocked, Shocked! Daily Mail Retracts Phony Story Of Falsification By NOAA Researchers
A self-policing group within the British news industry has forced the tabloid The Mail on Sunday to acknowledge that an article it published asserting that climate researchers in the United States had manipulated data was inaccurate and misleading. A statement saying the news organization “failed to take care over the accuracy of the article” was posted on The Mail on Sunday’s website early Sunday and was to appear in the print edition as well.
Publication of the statement was required after the self-regulating group, the Independent Press Standards Organization, ruled in favor of a complaint that the article, which was published on Feb. 5, had misrepresented the comments of a former scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about a 2015 climate change paper by a leading NOAA climate researcher, Thomas R. Karl, and others.
The Mail on Sunday, the statement said, also failed to correct “significantly misleading statements” in the article, which was written by David Rose and based on the claims of the former NOAA scientist, John J. Bates. The press standards group, known as IPSO, was expected to publish the full text of its ruling on its website.
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Most of the article’s assertions were rejected by scientists in the days after it was published. Former colleagues of Dr. Bates, who at one time was in charge of archiving data at the National Centers for Environmental Information, where Mr. Karl served as director, ascribed Dr. Bates’s assertions to lingering resentment over a demotion. Dr. Bates himself, in an interview after the Mail article was published, said he had not intended to accuse Mr. Karl of manipulating data. But the article made Dr. Bates into something of a hero in the community of climate change denialists and others who claim that some climate scientists are politicizing the subject.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/16/climate/british-press-watchdog-climate-change.html
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