Entretanto,
The Battle of Climategate is over. The Battle for the Internet has begun.
Is this the beginning of the end of big media? I kicked my heels on the way to work today, felt a zing of joy in the crisp winter air. Blogistan kicked some arse this week – MSM; yooor boys took one hell of a beating!
Climategate of course. The story that big media and government tried to kill with censorship, obscurity, inaction and faint, misleading one para stores. But the blogosphere simply would not let it die. More than that, the superb range of analysis poured into the subject by bloggers and commenters developed and expanded the story in such a way that finally, even the miserable wretches at the BBC couldn’t ignore it. Statisticians, developers, climatologists, scientists of every hue – every little piece of Climategate was picked over, deconstructed, reconstructed, scenarioed. No media organisation on earth could have thrown the resources at this story that the distributed blogosphere did – this was true disintermediation, true people journalism, true – dare I say it – people science. Faced with daily revelations and utterly incontrovertible assertions that hit the CRU hard (the fine toothed analysis of harry_read_me.txt being the nail in the coffin) big media finally had to act. Last night, the waters broke.
Newsnight’s Susan Watts finally ran with the killer blow – the model was scrap. That crucifies CRU. CRU, sorry, but you’re all out of a job. Oh maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but you’re the sacrificial lambs in this; didn’t you know? To save AGW, one leg of the beast – the exposed fraudulent leg – has to be hacked off. I can see the narrative: “Yes, there was over-egging, good scientists swayed by their convictions. We regret this, but the other models, the NASA models especially, are sound”. So you lot are dead meat. Prof Jones will be lucky to get a post at the University of Wallamaloo. What you guys should be doing now is whistleblowing enough to stop traffic. Hell, you’re going down – why not take the others with you?
But off the *content*, and onto the *medium*; wow. Great job fellers. Bishop Hill, Steve Mac, James Delingpole, the countless others, bloody well done.
But watch your backs.
We should all watch our backs. As I wrote before (here and elsewhere), when governments that depends for their very existence on their control of the narrative lose control of the narrative, they’re not going to be happy. This may have been the first global information battle, it is not the end of the information war. Give a little whoop. Kick your heels in the air. Then get back to work. This is not over.
BOORAH!
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