Bulk corrections needed

Is it uncharitable to imagine the reaction at the ABC’s Fact Check desk, run in  conjunction with RMIT, when MP Craig Kelly was quoted as saying the Pacific island of Tuvalu isn’t sinking, as has been widely and oft reported, not least by the ABC?

“You beauty!” you can almost hear little green reporters exclaim. “Let’s nail the denier for the climate-change sceptic and fool he is.”

And so it came to pass that calls were made and facts checked. The result, buried today at the very bottom of the ABC News site and obscured by a headline (reproduced above) that gives no hint of the finding unless you read the small-type blurb beneath, is that Kelly is right.

This will come as a surprise, not least to the Fact Checkers’ colleagues at the ABC, who have been beating up the “drowning islands” story for at least a decade. Indeed, only last month, the national broadcaster informed us how Former president of sinking island nation appeals to Australians for action on climate change.

Once the ABC has appended a correction to the above report, it can begin correcting the scores of others citing the not-so-settled science of drowning islands it has published and broadcast.  That is likely to happen at, oh, about the same time Tuvalu vanishes from sight.

In other words, never, this being the ABC.