It's rare for a mere television host, as opposed to the prime minister or the leader of the opposition, to be the subject, in the space of three weeks, of no fewer than three vituperative editorials, not to mention half a dozen 'news' stories, in our national broadsheet.

But when you are the host of Media Watch, and you have the temerity to criticise The Australian, you come to expect it.

My predecessors David Marr and Monica Attard, and their executive producers Peter McEvoy and Tim Palmer, experienced similar treatment. So really it's nothing new.

The essence of The Australian's attack this time around is that Media Watch criticises its coverage of climate change issues because I am a fanatical champion of what it terms 'ABC Groupthink'. In the first of its three editorials - in some ways the most bizarre of the three - it lifted a couple of sentences from a speech delivered in 1946 by Sir Richard Boyer, the then-chairman of the ABC. There is a small minority of the national audience, said Sir Richard, for whom ABC programs can do little, because they are:

...closed-minded thinkers and zealots impervious to fact, to argument, to anything and everything which does not accord with their pre-conceived points of view. It is their boast that nothing will ever induce them to change their minds.

But such, argues The Australian, are those members of Media Watch's audience who appreciate our occasional attempts to correct the distorted science reporting to which that newspaper is prone.

It is an extraordinary claim, especially since Media Watch's regular audience is considerably larger than The Australian's readership.

Yesterday on The Drum, Martin Hirst had a go at The Australian's own 'groupthink'. I won't go over that ground again. But in that article, he says this about the current dispute between Media Watch and The Oz:

Allegations of misreporting (paywalled) - deliberate or otherwise - have been flying between the two for weeks now and frankly, despite my intense interest, I find it hard to pick a winner. Dates and events tend to blur; perhaps it is only of ultimate interest to those intimately involved.... It has become a "he said, she said" war of words... The issue is really one of who do you believe.

Well actually, Media Watch has only had one go at the topic, before this. The Australian, on the other hand, seems to believe that the more often and the more loudly it accuses its opponent of uttering falsehood, and congratulates itself for uttering truth, the more people it will persuade to believe it. Its latest editorial barrage is headed:

CORRECT YOUR ERRORS, MR HOLMES

Reluctantly, I'm forced to defend myself and my team against charges of having made egregious mistakes. I apologise in advance to those of you who find the whole business tedious beyond belief. (And a tip to those rare mortals who wish assiduously to follow up my links. The Australian's material is mostly behind a paywall. If you are not a subscriber, you can take whatever I quote from the relevant article, paste it into Google, and you should be able to access the original article or editorial.)

The story starts with a front page article by Rosslyn Beeby in The Canberra Times on June 4 last year, headlined "Climate of Fear". You can view a PDF of the original front page here.

Its first paragraph (as first pars usually do) stated the general thesis of the article:

Australia's leading climate change scientists are being targeted by a vicious, unrelenting email campaign that has resulted in police investigations of death threats.

The second paragraph began to supply the detail in support of that broad statement:

The Australian National University has confirmed it moved several high-profile climate scientists, economists and policy researchers into more secure buildings, following explicit threats to their personal safety.

The Australian keeps claiming that any ordinary mortal reading those two paragraphs would assume that people at ANU had received death threats. Yet the story says no such thing. It says they had received 'threats to their personal safety'.

Altogether Rosslyn Beeby talked to more than 30 scientists at universities across the nation. Some did claim to have received death threats. Many more had received emails and messages that amounted to vicious abuse.

But Beeby did not report that death threats had been directed to people at ANU.

That's what Media Watch said when it dealt with this issue on May 21 this year.

The Australian keeps insisting that we are wrong, because

...numerous news reports understood The Canberra Times report to have said just that.

It then quotes several news reports about death threats to ANU scientists. But not one of them was based on Beeby's Canberra Times report.

One, by AAP, appeared on June 4 on a lot of newspaper websites, including The Canberra Times's and The Australian's. It is still on The Australian's website. It has not been corrected or clarified.

It begins:

A CANBERRA university has increased security following death threats to its climate scientists, some of whom were moved to a safer location.

Another story, posted on Fairfax websites on June 5, is by Eamonn Duff, who works for the Sydney Sun-Herald, not The Canberra Times.

It is quite clear, if you read these stories, that they are based not on Beeby's article, but on an interview that the ABC conducted on the morning of June 4 with the new vice-chancellor at ANU, Professor Ian Young, who is not even mentioned in Beeby's article. It was Young who apparently claimed that ANU scientists had received recent death threats. According to an ABC Online report of June 4.

Vice-chancellor Professor Ian Young says the scientists have received large numbers of emails, including death threats and abusive phone calls ... He says it has been happening for the past six months and the situation has worsened significantly in recent weeks.

Our Media Watch report went into some detail about the ABC interview, what we do and don't know about it, what Professor Young now says about it, and whether the ABC should now clarify its own report. Check it out.

As we also made clear, it was that ABC report that prompted blogger Simon Turnill to put in an FOI request for abusive emails sent to members of the ANU's Climate Change Institute during the period January to June 2011 - the 'past six months' mentioned by Professor Young.

That FOI request eventually yielded, after an intervention by the Privacy Commissioner, 11 emails. None threatened physical harm to the recipients, let alone death threats.

On its front page, on May 3 this year, The Australian's Christian Kerr reported:

Claims that some of Australia's leading climate change scientists were subjected to death threats as part of a vicious and unrelenting email campaign have been debunked by the Privacy Commissioner.

A few days later, The Australian's Chris Merritt wrote:

The credibility of the rest of The Canberra Times's allegations is yet to be tested. But the paper's reporting concerning death threats at ANU is in tatters, as are the associated reports by the ABC.

Media Watch pointed out that the Canberra Times's article had not been 'debunked', nor was it 'in tatters', because it had never claimed that death threats had been sent to the ANU. However much The Australian tries to obfuscate, that is the simple truth.

(Nor, incidentally, do the 11 emails released prove that no ANU academics received death threats in those six months. The FOI request covered abusive emails sent to just six scientists, all of them at the Climate Change Institute. There are plenty of other people studying climate change and related issues at ANU. Professor Young still insists that some of them did receive emails that amounted to death threats in the relevant period.)

In any case - and this is a factor which The Australian keeps dodging around, although it is crucial - the 11 emails were in fact irrelevant to the ANU scientists being moved to more secure offices, because that had happened 16 months earlier, in February 2010.

The Canberra Times's Rosslyn Beeby no doubt knew this, but did not make it clear in her report. The ABC and the AAP don't seem to have taken it aboard, and certainly didn't report it back in June 2011. Simon Turnill didn't understand it when he put in his FOI request.

And nor, in its recent reporting, did The Australian, which is why some of it makes no sense at all. On May 3rd, Christian Kerr wrote this:

Chief Scientist Ian Chubb, who was the ANU's vice-chancellor at the time, last night admitted he did not have any recollection of reading the emails before relocating the university's researchers.

Well, as Media Watch pointed out, of course he hadn't read 'the emails' - if by that, Kerr meant the 11 emails released under FOI. Because they had been written between January and June 2011, and the ANU scientists had been moved in February 2010. In fact Chubb ceased to be vice-chancellor in February 2011.

The Australian has simply ignored this blunder, preferring instead to cook up non-existent 'errors' in Media Watch's reporting. I know it's tedious to say so, but this isn't a matter of 'he said, she said'. Media Watch has reported accurately. The Australian has not. It's as simple as that.

There is one last bone of contention. Media Watch suggested that there was no shortage of evidence that death threats had indeed been sent to leading climate scientists. It quoted three that were reproduced on the Canberra Times's front page.

One read:

You will be chased down the street with burning stakes and hung from your f*** neck, until you are dead, dead, dead!

The Australian has since discovered - probably by the simple method of plugging it into Google - that an identical sentence was quoted by Clive Hamilton in a piece he wrote on this topic for The Drum in February 2010, some 16 months before The Canberra Times published it. It was part of an abusive email sent, he wrote, to a female 'campaigner'.

On May 25, The Australian's Ean Higgins wrote yet another report, this one headlined:

ABC 'evidence' of climate threats old and wrong

Naturally, Higgins didn't tell his readers that we had posted on our own website [warning: contains coarse language] several emails containing death threats, sent to prominent climate scientists in the relevant period.

No, he focused on that one email, 'old and wrong'.

Well, we're in a difficult position, because the recipient of the email used as an illustration by The Canberra Times, understandably, wants nothing more to do with the matter. But we are satisfied that he (not she) does not fit the description given by Clive Hamilton. The quoted sentence was part of a much longer, and highly unpleasant, email. The recipient was indeed an academic climate scientist, not a 'campaigner'.

Unfortunately, given the circumstances, those are statements for which we cannot provide any proof. But we did supply evidence that death threats to climate scientists aren't hard to find.

Even if we are right, that doesn't mean Dr Hamilton was wrong. Unfortunately, these abusive emails are circulated around the wilder fringes of the internet. The same words could well have been used in different emails, sent to different recipients, at different times, by different people.

The last question to consider is this: what precisely is the point of The Australian's obsessive reporting on this matter? Why was it worthy of front page treatment in the first place?

Is it simply that our national broadsheet loves to pick holes in its rivals' reporting? Well, yes, it certainly does that – but even its warped sense of news values would surely not consider that alone worthy of a front page lead.

The underlying message, it seems to me, is this: these climate scientists and their allies in the left-wing media are alarmists. They're alarmist about death threats, they're alarmist about the perils of climate change.

And the fact that many quite ordinary scientists, who are simply trying to do their job, are the recipients of the most revolting abuse is apparently not worthy of report.

Who you believe on this matter – The Australian, or Media Watch - should have nothing at all to do with whether or not you accept what the vast majority of qualified scientists are telling us about climate change. But the sad thing is that whether or not they accept that science will in fact determine which side most readers – among the few that have got this far – decide to believe.

If you want proof of that, just read the posts that follow.

Jonathan Holmes is the presenter of ABC TV's Media Watch. He tweets @jonaholmesMW. View his full profile here.