David Lewis comments on Dot Earth to Andrew Revkin about blatant "fudging" (word replacement? lying?) in quoting Vicky Pope of Britain's Met Office

Tenney here:  boldface emphases are mine.

Comment #42. David Lewis, Seattle, October 18th, 2009, 7:07 a.m.

I see Romm blogged his outrage when you wrote:

“The recent spate of relatively cool years is particularly noticeable because it followed a seesawing from unusually COOL temperatures to unusually hot ones in the 1990s, said Vicky Pope of Britain’s climate agency, called the Met Office….”

So, I googled the article and saw:

“The recent spate of years with STABLE temperatures is particularly noticeable because it followed a seesawing from unusually cool temperatures to unusually hot ones in the 1990s, said Vicky Pope of Britain’s climate agency, called the Met Office.”

Now, obviously, Romm isn't going to fly off the handle like that over something that didn't actually hit the streets on paper, and when I go to my local library to confirm, I am, no doubt, going to find that this deed was done.

I ran into your one-year anniversary blog, and here's a quote from there:

"To my mind, for most of the issues that will shape this century most profoundly, the old model of journalism is no longer a good fit."

No, what we need now is the new model, where you can publish lies, then change what you've published for the online record so when people look it up online they won't find it, so you can try to boost circulation as you cater to the morons who believe humans are not a large enough influence on the planet to be causing all these things the scientists are so alarmed about. What we don't need, according to you:

"That old form is illustrated by the authority conveyed in a printed front page, or Walter Cronkite’s sign-off on the “CBS Evening News”: “And that’s the way it is….”

No. We don't need no stinking Walter Cronkite conviction. What we do need is flexibility. Especially here at the NYTimes, where plummeting ad revenue is leading to lower stock prices, which, as everyone knows leads to less employees and lower paychecks. Again, quoting you:

"Whether the issue is terrorism or human-caused climate disruption, the reality is that we don’t know precisely “the way it is,” or what lies ahead."

That's right. And given that we don't know precisely what is ahead, that leaves an astonishing amount of room for outright lies. Like the word "cool." Like you don't know that the present decade is higher in temperature than any previous decade in the record of the last centuries. Like you haven't known that for years. Like you slipped up and used "cool." Like no one told you to do it. Yes, that's right, the old model of journalism is no longer a "good fit".

So here you are, bald faced liar that you are, the guy who would know the instant he wrote it that "cool" was not exactly the right word to use there, especially for the guy who won the John Chancellor award for what, who knows now, writing for publication that the planet is experiencing some relatively "cool" years as opposed to the hottest on record, changing them in this ephemeral electronic world, not having the guts to leave them up there for history, what, do you think you can go to every library that collects the NYTimes and change that, what is this?

Its time for you to get out of this job and leave it to someone who is a human being who understands that they and their descendants have to live here and there is an historic debate going on that requires reporters to report the truth as they see it, not what some owner or editor has decided the readers want to hear.

Link to comment on the Dot Earth blog of the New York Times' online edition:

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/queries-on-the-times-and-the-environment/?permid=42#comment42