The Associated Press employed 11 reporters to fact check the 432 pages of Sarah Palin’s autobiography, Going Rogue, but only used five scribes to “fact check” the more than 1,000 pages of Climategate e-mails.

In the case of Palin’s book, the AP’s vaunted team found nothing but a few differences in interpretations, and some “inconsistencies” that were not inconsistent at all, except in the AP’s view. In the case of the Climategate e-mails, the AP’s approach was just the opposite: In the face of massive academic fraud, the AP four-man team found nothing of consequence.

Heading up the AP’s Climategate-debunking team is Seth Borenstein, who has been called the Baghdad Bob of Global Warming. Here’s a good list of Borenstein’s hysterical stories over the past few years.

In the report in today’s News & Observer, headlined “E-mails show tact, not climate science, was bad,” the AP team does its best imitation of the three monkeys with their eyes, ears and mouths covered. While the global-warming extremists accuse skeptics of being “flat Earthers,” it is they who refuse to see what is there in these e-mails.

Here’s the first paragraph:

E-mail messages stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data – but the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

Translated, that means:

“We checked over these leaked e-mails, and although they reveal academic fraud, intimidation of skeptical scientists, manipulated data, and fudged statistical models, we don’t care. We will continue to push the religion of global warming regardless of the extent to which anthropogenic global warming is revealed largely to be a hoax.”

Borenstein and his confreres ignore the fact that the statistical data sets used by the top global warming scientists are faulty, which makes any resulting data also faulty. They ignore the fact that a group of scientists intent on pushing global warming write papers and get them peer-reviewed by a subset of their own group, which, of course, pronounces the work important and accurate.

They ignore the fact that the famous “hockey stick” graph, upon which most of this hysteria is based, even if you accept it as presented by the global warming extremists, is alarming only if taken completely out of context. Check out the following video:

Even if you allow that the hockey stick is real, and many scientist say it is a statistical trick, the Associated Press is content to report it out of context to achieve an alarmist response from the public. That’s exactly the method of the global warming extremists.

Such is journalism today.

Jon Ham is vice president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of its newspaper, Carolina Journal.