From climateprogress.org
Weblog Awards duped by deniers — again!
January 2nd, 2009
As President Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all the time. Once again, the people running the Weblog Awards have been suckered into legitimizing anti-scientific denialism.
The finalist list is out for the 2008 Weblog awards “Best Science Blog,” and two of the ten finalists are anti-scientific websites primarily devoted to spreading disinformation (and noninformation) on global warming– just like 2007.
The 2007 “competition” ended up being yet another classic exercise in the right wing perverting an otherwise reasonable web idea — online voting for the best science blog. As Desmogblog explained in a post titled, The “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” beating “Vast Left Wing” Voting for Best Science Weblog, the right wing voted en masse for Climate Audit and the rational people all voted for Discover magazine’s excellent Bad Astronomy Blog. In the end, the process was so controverisal that the Awards folk simply called it a tie — saying each blog ended up with exactly 20,000 votes.
It would be ironic that the choice of best science blog was not made scientifically — except that the result was an anti-scientific website run by someone who isn’t even a scientist has for the past year posted on his website a “Best Science Blog” logo. That isn’t ironic. It is both tragic and farcical.
It would be like James Frey winning an award for Best Memoir — but not like Dick Cheney winning an award for being the best Vice President, since Cheney is actually a VP.
To quote Lincoln again:
January 2nd, 2009
As President Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all the time. Once again, the people running the Weblog Awards have been suckered into legitimizing anti-scientific denialism.
The finalist list is out for the 2008 Weblog awards “Best Science Blog,” and two of the ten finalists are anti-scientific websites primarily devoted to spreading disinformation (and noninformation) on global warming– just like 2007.
The 2007 “competition” ended up being yet another classic exercise in the right wing perverting an otherwise reasonable web idea — online voting for the best science blog. As Desmogblog explained in a post titled, The “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” beating “Vast Left Wing” Voting for Best Science Weblog, the right wing voted en masse for Climate Audit and the rational people all voted for Discover magazine’s excellent Bad Astronomy Blog. In the end, the process was so controverisal that the Awards folk simply called it a tie — saying each blog ended up with exactly 20,000 votes.
It would be ironic that the choice of best science blog was not made scientifically — except that the result was an anti-scientific website run by someone who isn’t even a scientist has for the past year posted on his website a “Best Science Blog” logo. That isn’t ironic. It is both tragic and farcical.
It would be like James Frey winning an award for Best Memoir — but not like Dick Cheney winning an award for being the best Vice President, since Cheney is actually a VP.
To quote Lincoln again:
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
And calling Climate Audit and Watts Up With That science blogs — or for that matter calling the Drudge Report and The Onion science blogs — doesn’t make them ones.
And that brings us to 2008.
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