Maxwell Boykoff has written one of those activism-dressed-up-as-academia papers on the subject of media coverage of climate change. Apparently the media should be ignoring dissenting views. Who would have thought it!
To the extent that mass media misrepresent and/or gratuitously cover these outlier views, they contribute to ongoing illusory, misleading, and counterproductive debates within the public and policy communities, and poorly serve the collective public.
Sounds as though these transgressors are public enemies. Burn them in the streets I say.
Boykoff gets a lot wrong in his two paragraphs on Climategate. This sentence was a goodie:
After 6 months of multiple independent investigations into possible wrongdoing by data manipulation and the violation of U.K. Freedom of Information laws, Phil Jones and the other climate scientists involved in the email discussions were cleared of the legal charges (Adam, 2010).
Independent - nope. The Russell inquiry was to all intents and purposes run by a former colleague of Jones. And no legal charges were ever brought because of the statute of limitations, so nobody was "cleared" of anything. But Jones was found guilty of misleading policymakers over "hide the decline", so the allegation of data manipulation stuck. Oh yes, and we still have no investigation of the allegations of journal nobbling, so the questions over the integrity of the climate literature remain.
I wonder what the rest of the paper is like?