Notes from all over

The ever-modest James Delingpole, who has a nice word for Quadrant and climate scam roundsman Tony Thomas, on the tenth anniversary of Climategate:

… What Climategate revealed, however, is that the climate change “experts” we’re supposed to trust just aren’t trustworthy. They lie, they cheat, they’re motivated more by grant-troughing and dodgy political activism than they are by — lol — the disinterested quest for knowledge. That was the real shocker at the time of Climategate: that the people on whose “expert” wisdom trillions of dollars worth of your money and my money are being spent on sundry green boondoggles are in fact a lousy bunch of fraudulent second-raters unfit to run a cookie bake sale, let alone a scam involving upwards of one percent of the global economy…

Meanwhile, Israel Folau attributes bushfires and brimstone to the wrong god and is further assailed by those who know for a “settled science” certainty that it is not Yahweh but Gaia inflicting the flames on carbon sots and other sinners staining their green souls with the sins of SUV ownership and an appreciation of air conditioning. If only the ousted rugby star had traded his favoured variety of religious ratbaggery for the Church of Climate Change, oh how his sporting career might have been allowed to prosper.

Folau’s sin was speaking his mind in an age when unauthorised utterances simply aren’t tolerated. In this regard,  ABC Washington correspondent James Glenday could give him a few pointers on the astute omission of pertinent but inconvenient information. That talent is much appreciated at the national broadcaster, where Sarah Ferguson’s train-wreck three-part 4Corners series on Donald Trump’s fealty to Moscow made the point rather neatly. Having  managed to avoid any reference or explanation that might have diminished her portrait of the US President as Putin’s puppet, she further demonstrated her ABC-worthiness by neglecting to file a post-Mueller follow-up report conceding all her earlier hints, suggestions and accusations amounted to nothing better than a melange of misinformation. Now she’s off to China with hubby Tony Jones in tow to report the goings on in Beijing, failing upwards also being an oft-seen ABC motif.

On that precedent, reporter Glenday can also anticipate a glittering ABC career, as his weekend report on how badly the impeachment is going for Trump turns to law professor Susan Low Bloch for confirmation. She “believes Donald Trump committed a textbook, impeachable offence.”

An impartial observer? Not quite.

One of the great American innovations is a website, OpenSecrets.org, where individuals’ donations to politicians and parties can be looked up in a few seconds and a couple of clicks. The entries for Professor Bloch’s donations would seem to indicate a devoted and long-term Democrat with deep pockets. That information would have been useful for any of Glenday’s readers, who might not have been left with the impression that the professor’s analysis of the impeachment was that of an impartial academic, rather than that of a highly partisan four-figure-sum supporter of Hillary Clinton.

As the US blogger David Burge puts it, modern journalism is about covering stories — covering them with a pillow until the inconvenient ones show no more sign of life whatsoever. There is a haberdashery store’s supply of pillows at the ABC.

— roger franklin