Listener under fire as columnist Dave Hansford departs after criticising climate change sceptics. By any chance, is there a connection?

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Suddenly, it has become apparent that all is not well at the Listener, my favourite New Zealand magazine. Its legendary photographer, Jane Ussher, is leaving. There are dark tales of unhappiness in the subbery. Yesterday I was referred to a comment by the much-missed writer Denis Welch, lamenting that the magazine’s owners, APN (also owner of the NZ Herald) are launching a giveaway magazine aimed at aging baby boomers.

Said Denis, on his blog recently: “The Listener’s natural territory is aging baby-boomers, but rather than invest in building it up, APN chooses to start what in effect will be a rival publication sure to eat into the Listener’s main demographic. On all the evidence so far, APN has never had any clear idea about what it should do with the Listener, least of all promote it and resource it properly, so is letting it quietly wither away. Which is a bitter shame, considering what the magazine has been and still could be.”

This week, the Listener’s Ecologic columnist, Dave Hansford, revealed he had been, um, let go, after he wrote a piece critical of climate change sceptics Owen McShane and Bryan Leyland.

As someone who has regularly praised the Listener and has just written a series of articles critical of how the BBC changed a climate change story in a controversial way, my ears pricked up when I read a comment Dave posted on Wednesday on Hot Topic, Gareth Renowden’s climate change blog.

Dave said he was “dropped from Ecologic with no valid explanation”shortly after his March 22 column, Some like it hot, which, in his words, “looked at media treatment of climate deniers and the NZ Climate Coalition’s links to Exxon through front groups like the Heartland Institute and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.”

The NZ Climate Science Coalition is, of course, the sceptical group run by iconoclast McShane and engineer Leyland which challenges the view that mankind is in deep trouble because greenhouse gas emissions are heating up the planet.

Hot Topic took up the issue robustly: “The recent [Listener] decision to drop Ecologic columnist Dave Hansford from its roster of writers calls into question its editorial integrity and independence,” Gareth wrote in an article titled Climate cranks claim a scalp.

“Did a threat by a member of the NZ Climate ‘Science’ Coalition to take the magazine to the Press Council hasten Hansford’s demise? Did Listener editor Pamela Stirling drop Hansford under pressure, or because his views didn’t fit with hers, or both? And if she did, what does this imply for journalism in New Zealand?”

These are good questions, and when I read them over my breakfast yesterday, I quickly put them to Pamela Stirling in an email in which I referred her to the Hot Topic article.

While waiting for her reply, I noticed Russell Brown climb into the issue too, calling it a “fairly extraordinary story” about Dave Hansford departing from The Listener “in the wake of what seems to have been fairly heavy pressure from the ‘sceptical’ Climate Science Coalition.”

As Russell and Gareth both noted, this week’s Listener carries two articles in response to Dave’s column. One, rubbishing global warming theory, is by Bryan Leyland and climate scientist, Auckland University Associate Professor Chris de Freitas, who argue the global-warming debate is far from settled. The second, Doubting the doubters, by Canterbury University ecologist, Professor Dave Kelly, says “the cost of not doing enough about climate change is a stuffed planet.”

On the publication of these “for and against” articles, Dave Hansford says: “In the Listener’s ‘both sides of the debate’ treatment this week, we appear to have a situation where somebody who presents a page of verifiable, supported facts is summarily dismissed, while somebody else is given free rein to present a page of unsupported misrepresentation, disinformation and plain lies (and I’m not talking about Dave Kelly!).”

The way the media treats the climate change issue interests me immensely. My take on it, as a journalist who has written serious news stories for two decades, is that most media, here and overseas, have shamelessly and gleefully taken global warming and beaten it up into the latest Armageddon, with the public being fed a diet of extremism in which almost every storm and iceberg is claimed to be the harbinger of doom. The media worldwide treated the Y2K Bug and Bird Flu the same way. “We’re all doomed!” And as a serious journalist, when I see a beat-up, I see bullshit. I simply don’t believe everything the media splashes about climate change. That doesn’t mean I doubt there is a serious scientific issue. There clearly is, but it doesn’t often leak into the popular media.

And, also as a journalist, I am seriously concerned that a columnist such as Dave Hansford might have been “let go” because he wrote something that upset somebody on the other side of a raging debate. That would concern me even more than when I saw climate activist Jo Abess boasting she had got the BBC to tone down the story that revealed there had been no global warming now since 1998. It’s more concerning, because I don’t think a columnist should be sacked because someone was annoyed with their viewpoint. A columnist who doesn’t annoy a whole lot of readers is probably not worth reading.

And while an editor has every right to choose what columnists will fill her pages, and every right to print “for and against” articles like Pamela Stirling did this week on the climate change issue, I would like to think an editor would have far deeper reasons for ditching a columnist than some might believe was the case with Dave Hansford. Indeed, as Dave himself seems to suggest was the case, and he was the one let go. But I also suspect Stirling had other reasons than this single column. Columnists come and go regularly on many publications. There have been other recent changes at the Listener.

Unfortunately, Stirling has not replied to my invitation to respond to the questions I posed to her, first emailed early on Thursday morning, then again early today, so this commentary has therefore been published without her side of it. If and when she gets back to me, I will post what she says.

Update: In his NZ Herald media column today, John Drinnan quotes Pamela Stirling as “insisting that the two events are unconnected.” Stirling says Hansford was only ever hired as a short-term position for two months and the column was now being written by a staffer, Drinnan reports.

He adds: “But it’s clear that Stirling’s approach to the eco-column - like her approach to the Listener - has been a lot more right of centre than the line of the old days. Stirling took over in 2004 and she says that for a long time the Listener had been the house journal of the Alliance Party. Stirling says the magazine is more centrist and allows everyone to express a view. But global warming campaigners have become impatient with persistent sceptics like Leyland - many of them pro-business - who question the human impact on global warming. Ten or even five years ago the blogland left would have been closely allied to the Listener.The Ecologic row is tinged with a slightly sad acceptance from the left that the Listener is no longer part of the movement.”

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Filed under Journalism, Science, Skeptical

Tags: climate change, Dave Hansford, Listener