Hot Topic has a fairly extraordinary story this morning, about the circumstances of the departure of Ecologic columnist Dave Hansford from The Listener in the wake of what seems to have been fairly heavy pressure from the "sceptical" Climate Science Coalition after this column ran in the magazine.
The complaints -- and a threat to go to the Press Council and perhaps further -- wound up with the publications of these letters in the magazine, and a "balance"-style feature pitting two members of the CSC against scientist Dave Kelly in respective opinion pieces.
Poneke, who has devoted considerable energy to the topic of intimidation of journalists in the climate science debate, tells me he'll be contacting Listener editor Pamela Stirling and will be reporting tomorrow.
Meanwhile, an American journalism blog has a report on the ripping out of pages from the Sunday Star Times' Sunday magazine after someone decided that some asterisk-heavy (and unflattering) quotes from a sex blog in the magazine's editorial were too strong for public consumption. And, yes, it has a scan of the page everyone's talking about. You can see that in the Media7 blog.
The full video from last night's show is up on ondemand, and clips are on the main site (Windows Media). It should be on the podcast soon.
What's it about? Political spin, and how it makes its way into the media and our minds.
And, in particular, this search result. .
It was a slightly difficult recording this week, not least because it was very bloody hot indeed on the set, but I think it's edited up quite well. The panel is Ben Thomas, David Slack and Simon Wilson.