17--Count 'Em, 17--News Companies Support FOIA Lawsuit Against Hockey Stick Graphologist Michael Mann

The science may be "settled," but that's only because the "settled science" proponents have settled on non-transparency as their M.O.:

A group seeking access to climate scientist Michael Mann’s emails through Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA) has a surprising new group of news media allies.

From wire agencies to liberal Atlantic Media, Inc., 17 news groups have supported the release of documents, according to Columbia Journalism Review. 

“Organized by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 17 news organizations, including National Public Radio, Dow Jones, and The Washington Post, submitted an amicus brief in November, supporting the group’s rights to Mann’s emails,” CJR said. Other groups include Politico, Associated Press and Reuters, Gannett Co. which owns USA Today, and News Corp.

Notably absent from that list are, not surprisingly, "CNN and The New York Times." For those two media outlets, the refusal to question the adamancies of climate science and an aversion to scrutinizing Barack Obama's flimflams go hand-in-hand.

And I'm sure that, just like Lois Lerner, another aficionado of non-transparency, Prof. Mann has absolutely nothing to hide. It behooves us to point out, however, that someone who is so thin-skinned that he's suing Mark Steyn for dissing him and his stick in an insulting way, but who at the same time has a Janus-faced response to the media spotlight, i.e. basking in it when it's worshipful but shunning it when it isn't, can hardly be described as someone with a firm grip on the moral high ground.

The above described media pile on against Prof. Mann and how he's brought it on himself brings to mind a famous biblical quotation: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind." That final bit was borrowed for Inherit the Wind, the title of the play, and then a movie, about the Scopes Monkey Case. I guess that's fitting, given that the Steyn prosecution is being framed as Scopes redux (although I, for one, have hesitated to see it like that).