Making a mess is easier than cleaning it up

A major UK paper has been forced to retract an article filled with false smears against the IPCC and climate scientists. The so-called "Amazongate" scandal was a complete beat-up (like much of the woeful mainstream coverage of climate "scandals"). Basically every claim in the article was acknowledged as false or misleading. The real scandal was not found at the IPCC, but in a media and blog world where such claims were immediately picked up and echoed on literally thousands of sites. Ironically, the accusation levelled at the scientists (making claims based on unsubstantiated sources) was actually only true of the journalists and bloggers who repeated it.

The Sunday Times only made the embarrassing retraction when one of the scientists blatantly misquoted and slandered in the article complained to the UK's Press Complaints Commission.

The sad thing is that each step of the process of complaint, investigation and correction probably used considerably more time, energy and money than the original investigation and publication. Misinformation is much, much easier to create than to clean up. Much like oil spills, I guess.