Read here. Steve McIntyre does a marvelous job of dissecting the Mother Jones article about ClimateGate. With his intricate knowledge regarding the entire subject, Steve clearly reveals the ineptness of the reporter's effort.
A few of his comments:
"As a result, while her take on events is biased – not surprising given the publication – it bears enough resemblance to reality that it’s interesting to observe her blind spots – the things that she doesn’t notice illuminate that bias.....she uncritically accepts self-serving Team assertions as authoritative. For example, she uncritically accepted the Team’s spin on the NAS panel report...Like other environmentalists, the think tanks are a bugbear for her. From my perspective, I think that she over-rates the importance of think tanks in our story...it doesn’t seem to me that the think tanks had anything more than a peripheral involvement, though Mother Jones and their allies fervently want to think otherwise.....Sheppard loses her way on CRU chronology...She also has a tin ear towards the corrosive effect of CRU’s mendacious response to my FOI request – a piece of mendacity that none of the inquiries dealt with either.....Too often, Sheppard accepted untrue statements by the Team at face value. She repeats Santer’s wild accusations.....Although realclimate was part of the Climategate network almost from its startup in December 2004, Sheppard does not mention it in her chronology until Sep 2009, when she characterizes it has having been launched to “fight back against sceptics”. In fact, it was started in December 2004, with Climate Audit being started soon thereafter to fight back against attacks from realclimate.....Mother Jones uncritically accepts some discredited piffle from the University of Victoria as evidence of a wider conspiracy.....Sheppard uncritically accepts the inquiries at face value – not commenting on their failure to interview critics, their failure to provide transcripts, their failure to examine or report on the issues that had been raised at Climate Audit.....Sheppard’s own diagnoses seem wrongheaded in the extreme. She says that climate scientists were unprepared to deal with the news circus. However, climate scientists have been issuing news releases for years."
As they say, read the whole thing - it's excellent and informative and polite.
From Steve's critical review, one's take home message is not to believe much this reporter writes in the future about ClimateGate, or climate science, in general. She has a unique combination of biases, gullibility and cluelessness that disallows any accurate representation being made by her on this topic.