Yesterday morning, The New York Times leveled a false charge on the paper’s front page, arguing that the Trump administration had not made public an interagency report on climate science. (Spoiler Alert: It’s been available to the public all along.)
Written under an ominous “FEARS OF SUPPRESSION” sub-header, The Times said the draft report “has not been made public,” an incorrect statement feeding the paper’s false notion that the Trump administration has been hiding the report. Fortunately for the public, “a copy of it was obtained by The New York Times.”
Contrary to The Times story, the draft report was publicly available during the nearly-three-month-long comment period. It has also remained publicly-accessible to this day via The National Academies of Sciences’ Public Access Records Office, as well as via this publicly-accessible archive. (The Trump administration has until August 18 to decide whether to release a final version of the report.)
Climate scientists who themselves were lead authors of the report in question have since blasted The Times for its coverage, undercutting the article’s insinuation that frightened climate scientists were leaking a report that the Trump administration was withholding from the public.
Nonetheless, The New York Times’ false charge spread like wildfire across the Twitter feeds of several mainstream reporters.
It’s worth noting that the White House’s response, which the paper has deemed unworthy of inclusion in its latest version of the article, suggests that The Times never even reached out for comment until after the story had already been published.
“It’s very disappointing, yet entirely predictable to learn The New York Times would write off a draft report without first verifying its contents with the White House or any of the federal agencies directly involved with climate and environmental policy. As others have pointed out – and The New York Times should have noticed – drafts of this report have been published and made widely available online months ago during the public comment period. The White House will withhold comment on any draft report before its scheduled release date.” – Press Secretary Sarah Sanders
After being confronted with the facts, The Times issued a correction ** on page A17 ** of today’s paper that reads less like an admission of wrongdoing and more like an attempt to minimize the significance of the false charge they made. The correction was also incomplete, since it lacked details of the other methods by which the report has been publicly available.
Had the paper run a story focused on concerns that the Trump administration would ultimately not publish the final report, that would be one thing. But to conjure up and propagate the false notion of a cover-up, only to bury any admission of wrongdoing in a weak correction on page A17, that’s something else altogether.
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