How Fox News Spun Climategate

Fox News Washington Managing Editor Bill Sammon requested reporters mention that climate change is based on questionable data during the Copenhagen climate summit. “Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data,” Sammon wrote in an email from last December leaked to Media Matters, “we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.” Sammon, who also sent an email asking reporters to call the “public option” the “government option” during the health-care debate, sent the email minutes after a Fox correspondent reported that U.N. scientists say 2000-2009 was “expected to be the warmest decade on record.”