- Bishop Hill blog

Andy Revkin has responded to the charge that the New York Times is operating a double standard, publishing the Wikileaks documents to fanfares, while refusing to do the same when the Climategate emails appeared.

His response is by way of an update to a post he made a few days after Climategate.

I'll note two things about my coverage of the unauthorized distribution of the climate files:

First, while I initially did not publish the contents of the climate files and e-mails (at the request of Times lawyers, considering the uncertain provenance and authenticity of the materials at the time), I did (from the start) provide links to the caches of material set up elsewhere on the Web.

Secon, in the rush on the day the files were distributed across the Web, I called them "private" when, in fact, I should have said their senders had presumed they were private. As I've said off and on since then, given that much of the research discussed in the exchanges was done using taxpayers' money, any expectation of privacy wasn't justified.]

It's interesting to go back to the original posting, where Revkin calls the Climategate emails at various times "purloined", "acquired illegally" and "hacked", so I find the protestations of innocence revolving around the word "private" somewhat unconvincing.

I'm not sure about claims of concerns over the authenticity of the emails are valid either, given that the University of East Anglia had confirmed that their systems had been compromised on 20th November 2009. It seems to me that the Wikileaks and Climategate scenarios are identical in terms of the evidence of authenticity of the leaked material.