Let’s see: “My neighbor Bob makes too much noise at night. Those who make too much noise at night should be dealt with harshly.”

It seems to me that such phrasing, even stated as directly as I have here, means clearly that I’m referring not just to Bob, but an entire class of noise-making miscreants, *all* of whom should be treated harshly. It’s even unambiguous of interpretation, I’d say.

But it is nice to see that the old journalistic personal loyalty still holds, although I must say it causes me to lack confidence in the veracity of pretty much anything I see in the mass media unless I have independent verification of it.

BTW, there is absolutely no problem with Pachauri making such a comment. Good for him. At this point we’re a little past needing to be polite. Denialism is killing people already, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

However, this particular piece was none of the above. It was a seemingly traditional reported story. Someone was there, reporting on what transpired. At least that’s how I took it. So the bar is higher for that kind of journalism, to my mind.

It seems clear to me that neither an objective method nor rigorous verification were brought to bear on this story. And in my opinion, that makes it activism, not journalism.

As for the headline, if I had come darn near close to defaming Pachauri by attributing incendiary comments to him that he never made, I would have rewritten the headline to remove any cloud of doubt about this issue. Of course you are free to interpret what happened during those exchanges between Pachauri and Branson any way you’d like, and to write any headline you want. And the choices you make say a lot about the standards you use for deciding issues like these. As a former editor-in-chief of a magazine, my standards would have led me to change the headline, not just the story. But I’m not an activist, and I have not been since I decided long ago to become a journalist.

I’m going to leave for another time the argument over whether journalism-with-a-point-of-view — the kind we at Grist and so many others on the Web practice — can also be journalism you can trust. (I passionately believe that it can, and point to the work of my peers at Salon, Talking Points Memo, Mother Jones, et al.)

I’m puzzled by your characterization of our correction of Mark Hertsgaard’s story as “sort-of-kind-of.” We made errors, we documented how that happened, and we corrected them. We told the story. As a crusader for accuracy and a more transparent corrections process myself, I believe that’s a better option than the traditional opaque list of details followed by the rote “regret the error.” I wish we hadn’t made these errors, but we did, and we’ve dealt with them.

You believe that our headline, too, was erroneous. So let’s look at that.

The headline reads, “New approach to climate deniers: Launch them into space!”

This headline is, of course, like the conversation it was based on, jocular. (The exclamation mark is a giveaway, right?)

For over a decade Grist has been in the business of covering green issues with a light heart. Our headline style is not the New York Times’. Compare NYT: “As Permafrost Warms, Scientists See a Threat”; Grist: “The World Will End in a Fart.”

I’ve now watched the video of this conversation several times, and I invite anyone who’s interested to do the same. It seems quite clear to me that, while Branson’s original joke was indeed aimed at various unnamed officials who were considered to be blocking California’s clean-energy policies, by the time Pachauri picked it up the conversation had widened. Pachauri jokes that “those who are becoming obstacles to implement what is rational” should be sent into space. A minute later, Branson is saying, “Forget global warming. If you don’t believe it, that’s fine.” At this point, they’re having a broad discussion about how to persuade people who don’t accept the reality of global warming to nonetheless embrace the goal of energy independence.

Tom, you admit yourself that this is at least an “arguable” point, so it puzzles me that you immediately jump to some very broad-brush accusations of journalistic malfeasance on Grist’s part. If I thought our headline needed a correction, I’d correct it in a nanosecond. This isn’t about “the need to win the argument and advance the agenda.” Pachauri said these things and it isn’t our role or place to mitigate them or sugar-coat them. If we placed advocacy ahead of verification and journalistic ideals, surely we’d rush to try to sweep this whole story under the rug.

Personally, I think Andy Revkin is wildly overreacting to what was at worst a misfired joke. And I’m very sorry that Grist’s errors contributed to the general confusion here. But I also feel that you’re badly mischaracterizing Grist’s work.

Climate change skeptics will be confirmed in their false suspicion that the IPCC is a hopelessly biased activist organization, rather than a policy-neutral scientific assessment body. Pachauri and by extension the IPCC have yet again had some of their credibility chipped away.

False suspicion that the IPCC is a hopelessly biased activist organization?! With all due respect, as a recently published work by Canadian investigative journalist, Donna Laframboise, has clearly demonstrated, the IPCC – as currently constituted – is hopelessly biased (and, as Dr. Judith Curry has observed, tarnished in many other ways, as well).

As U.K. scientist and author of The Rational Optimist, Dr. Matt Ridley (recipient of the 2011 Manhattan Institute for Policy Research’s Hayak Award) noted in his review of Laframboise’s The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert:

For those of us who took the IPCC’s evaluations of climate at face value when they came out — I know I did — and thought that they were based on an impartial and careful process that relied on peer reviewed evidence, these revelations are shocking.

Her book is [...] one of the most important pieces of investigative journalism in recent years. It demolishes the argument that we need the mainstream media because the blogosphere will never do the hard work of investigative journalism. The opposite is true.

In the interest of full disclosure, I was among those who read her drafts (and some of my research is cited in her book); but this does not change the fact that (as I had noted in my own review on Amazon):

One cannot over-estimate the importance of this book in addressing the shortcomings of far too many so-called science journalists (and other media mavens) who have been content to let the UN’s IPCC rest on its self-anointed laurels for far too many years.

Until this book, far too many questions about the IPCC had been unasked – by far too many influential people. Donna has asked these questions, and meticulously researched the answers, which she presents in an eminently readable (and easily verifiable) fashion.

I would invite you to read The Delinquent Teenager… and determine for yourself whether your depiction of “false suspicion” is accurate. It is available in softcover, Kindle and PDF versions.