**UPDATED** 2/3/10, 1:26 PM PST

Max Blumenthal has called my post yesterday at Big Journalism “fact-challenged” and “riddled with falsehoods”.

I found five assertions in the piece that I had lied.

I will address them in order of their appearance:

Assertion #1:  ”Andrew Breitbart, who has paid O’Keefe and attempted to defend him by calling my reporting “FALSE,” has been undermined by O’Keefe himself. O’Keefe concedes my report was true — he was at the event. Breitbart has therefore been contradicted by O’Keefe.”

Response:  Neither Breitbart nor Big Journalism ever asserted that O’Keefe was not at the event.  The Blumenthal piece at salon.com asserts that O’Keefe was manning a table full of racist literature.  This implies he was working at the event or in some way connected with the event beyond being an audience member.  This is assertion is false, therefore, Blumenthal’s reporting was false. (more…)

Trillions of dollars are at stake in the man-made global warming debate.  The Climategate scandal – where leaked emails and computer programs involve dozens of prominent scientists worldwide – has almost everything one would want in a good scandal: conspiracies, fraud, possible destruction of documents, and lots of heated exchanges.  But the media has been reluctant to look into the problems and even when the controversy has been acknowledged it has been quickly dismissed as unimportant.

Newsweek poo-poohed Climategate as just showing “a few scientists in a bad light” and that “there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.”  The New York Times editorialized that “no one should be misled by all the noise” and that global warming was just too important “to let one set of purloined e-mail messages undermine the science and the clear case for action.”  Former Vice President Al Gore has been in full swing doing interviews the last few weeks, and the media has rarely challenged any of his claims.  Gore told Slate: “What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.”  He made the same comment unchallenged on MSNBC.  Yet, the thousand emails were written over thirteen years, and went right up through this year. (more…)