Year 3, Month 3, Day 2: One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other

The Hudson Valley Media Group runs a piece from the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch with the title, “Heartland Institute: Not a think tank, just in the tank.”

Oh, my, yes:

The purported Heartland Institute internal documents leaked to media outlets last week were not exactly revelatory.

Collectively, the 100 or so pages describe an advocacy group going about the business of pushing its agenda and raising money to help it do so. Chicago-based Heartland has been doing that since it was created in 1984 “to discover, develop and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems,” according to its current mission statement.

Still, the leak and Heartland’s response to it are useful reminders to anyone seeking hard information about controversial issues: Words such as “institute,” “center” and “council” in an organization’s name do not necessarily signal impartial inquiry or dispassionate investigation. Any organization can call itself a “think tank,” but sometimes spin is just spin.

When the documents first appeared on the Internet last week, Heartland quickly confirmed that some of its materials had been “stolen.” On Wednesday, Heartland declared one two-page memo to be an outright fake but said the rest of the material had not yet been reviewed to see if anything had been altered.

By Thursday, Heartland chief executive Joseph Bast wrote in a blog post that the organization still didn’t know if any documents had been modified. And in a letter sent Saturday to some Internet sites that had posted the documents, Heartland’s general counsel said the group still was investigating whether the documents had been altered.

Authenticating the documents isn’t that difficult. Heartland created and possesses the originals, after all. If it could discredit them, it would.

The first comment triggered this letter, which was sent off on February 25:

When confronted with Heartland Institute’s plans to disseminate climate-science denialist curricula, conservatives quickly invoke the “climategate” emails. The disagreements over statistical methods between scientists at the University of East Anglia are somehow equated to a heavily funded anti-science program affecting public schools nationwide, presumably because both involved documents obtained outside normal channels.

Well, no.

Three separate independent inquiries completely exonerated the UEA scientists, and other climatologists all over the world support their conclusions. The hackers who obtained the “climategate” emails have never revealed themselves, let alone apologized.

Conversely, the Heartland Institute’s climate-change denial curricula are produced by someone with no training in the field. While Heartland’s position is disputed by the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, their work is supported by corporations hoping to protect their profitability by delaying environmental regulation. The lone individual who obtained the Heartland documents almost immediately identified himself.

The two cases are emphatically not equivalent.

Warren Senders