Why the media delay on Climategate scandal?

Shades of Van Jones and Acorn. After a week of silence, the Portland Press Herald finally acknowledged that "Climategate" is a newsworthy issue. It's almost as though some ideologue on the news desk assumed that if the paper did not run the story it would go away.

But, as with Jones and Acorn, the story didn't disappear. It grew more legs. Stacks of revealing emails provided growing evidence of a conspiracy among leaders of the climate change community to cook the books.

The growing scandal engulfed the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, which has been in the forefront among climate change alarmists. The director of the unit, Prof. Phil Jones, was forced to step down.

The situation evoked a firestorm in the volatile British press, and in the U.S. it was reported all last week by Fox News, talk radio and and internet bloggers. But for days the saga of the incriminating emails went virtually unreported in the American mainstream media, including those in Maine. Not until Friday, for example, did the Portland Press Herald run its first story on the scandal.

Then, as if to show disdain for such a non-politically-correct view, the paper buried the story under a typically sycophantic piece seemingly designed to appease enviromentalists. A conspiracy? Unlikely.

Not a lot of deep thinking goes into the design of inside pages on small newspapers, so placement of stories depends on copy editors who too often allow their own political views to shape their work. Sadly, it happens all the time when more responsible editors nod off on the job.

The paper's best look into the scandal came on the same day's op-ed page. M.D. Harmon is the bete noir of the liberal community, and his Climategate column did not generate cheers from them.

For many Press Herald readers, last Friday's stories and Harmon's column constituted the first they had read about the bizarre machinations among leaders of the global warming establishment.

Perhaps some readers will choose not to believe a scandal exists, but shouldn't they at least be told of the controversy? It seems incredible that after its embarrassing failure to report in a timely manner on the Van Jones and Acorn stories that the paper would repeat its mistakes.

But it did.