Adventures in the quotemines of Oz

The Australian , commonly referred to as the Oz, is Australia’s only national general[1] newspaper. It’s also been, for some time, a national joke, particularly among bloggers, for its continuous War on Science, particularly as related to climate change, and for its propensity to melt down in response to criticism from blogs and media critics.

Last week, I added a bit of fuel to the fire with a column in the Australian Financial Review attacking the delusional thinking behind claims that the science of climate change is a hoax, fraud or conspiracy, which included the following passage:

While most media outlets give at least some space to these conspiracy theorists, the central role has been played by The Australian. Not only its opinion columnists (with a handful of honorable exceptions) and its editorials, but even its news reporting is dominated by the idea that mainstream science is on the verge of being overturned by the efforts of a group of dedicated amateurs, publishing their findings not in the peer-reviewed literature but through blogs, thinktanks and vanity presses

That looked a bit different when it came out of the quote mine.

Reading their latest installment in the War on Science (from William Kininmonth) I was surprised, to put it mildly, to find myself quoted as an authority for the proposition that

mainstream science is on the verge of being overturned by the efforts of a group of dedicated amateurs

In the spirit of sceptical inquiry, I’m not jumping to conclusions about the Oz itself on this one. Opinion editors rarely fact check their columnists, and on one memorable occasion back in the Tom Switzer era, reader Terje Peterson managed to elicit a correction from Janet Albrechtsen after a team effort here demonstrated that one of her columns was based on a misreading of statistics.

In the hope of a double, I’ve written to the Oz, asking for a correction in the following terms:

In “Cold facts dispel theories on warming” William Kininmonth attributed to John Quiggin the claim that “mainstream science is on the verge of being overturned by the efforts of a group of dedicated amateurs” . Quiggin does not hold this view, and the article in question referred to such claims, propagated by Kininmonth and others in the pages of The Australian, as displaying “a large dose of delusion.”

So, we’ll see what they have to say. Either way, anyone who thought Kininmonth deserved to be taken more seriously than, say, Lord Monckton, will have to think again.

fn1. The Australian Financial Review, for which I write, is roughly equivalent to the Financial Times or (except for the totally wingnutty Oped pages, which AFR dispensed with a decade or so ago) the WSJ.