Breitbart Site Says Big Blunder Was “Minor Citation Error”

Andrew Breitbart.<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/n3tel/5444076348/">Mark Taylor</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Earlier this week I wrote about a piece published on Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com that relies so heavily on flawed assertions about a new global-warming study that it’s ripe for a retraction. Not only did the piece wrongly attribute an author to the new study, published in Nature in late August, but it also recycled an old quote from that person to promote its claim that the study definitively refuted human-caused climate change. (The study, as I explained in detail, did nothing of the sort.)

Multiple attempts the prior week to reach Breitbart and the writer of the piece, Chriss W. Street, about the erroneous contents had failed to get their attention. But apparently my story (and subsequent posts in The New York Times, Salon and Media Matters) did: An editor’s note appeared on the Big Government piece later the same day. Unfortunately, it’s more of a wreck than it is rectifying. Breitbart.com’s “in-house counsel” Joel Pollak says in the note:

Earlier today, Mother Jones…accused Andrew Breitbart of a “global warming blunder” because the piece below cited Jykri Kauppinen as an author of a Nature study on cosmic rays. The author of the piece, Chriss W. Street, has indicated that Kauppinen is the author of a separate submission to Nature in 2010 that also contests the UN Climate Panel’s “consensus” view on the degree to which human activity contributes to global climate change. Street stands by his argument, regardless of the minor citation error that Breitbart’s habitual critics on the left have attempted to magnify.

Why Street failed to “indicate” in his piece the true orgin of Kauppinen’s comments, and why he passed them off as a conclusion of the study just published in Nature, Pollak doesn’t say. Nor does Pollak explain why the piece continues to state, erroneously, that Kauppinen is one of the new study’s authors. (Chalk it up, perhaps, to the stuff of “minor citation.”) As for Big Government’s blatantly wrong claim that the new study debunks overwhelming scientific consensus on humanity’s role in climate change, it seems that one was, well, simply too hot for them to touch.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate