National Review editor-in-chief Richard Lowry posted a response yesterday to a threat by climate scientist Michael Mann (No, not this guy. This other Michael Mann) to sue the magazine for libel. It seems one of NR’s writers, Mark Steyn, posted a snarky article describing Prof. Mann’s work as “fradulent” something he is highly sensitive too, although what Steyn was criticizing in particular has in fact been disputed by other scientists. Mann, for those of you who have forgotten, was one of the central figures in the so-called Climategate controversy.
Lowry dismisses the complaint as frivolous and without merit. He argues that Steyn’s use of the word “fraudulent” did not mean fraud in the legal sense, but that Steyn was merely calling him “intellectually dishonest” which is perfectly within the bounds of normal punditry.
Then Lowry goes all Tony Soprano on Mann, telling him he better back off before things get … uncomfortable for him:
And this is where you [readers] come in. If Mann goes through with it, we’re probably going to call on you to help fund our legal fight and our investigation of Mann through discovery. If it gets that far, we may eventually even want to hire a dedicated reporter to comb through the materials and regularly post stories on Mann.
My advice to poor Michael is to go away and bother someone else. If he doesn’t have the good sense to do that, we look forward to teaching him a thing or two about the law and about how free debate works in a free country. (Emphasis added)
In short, Prof. Mann: Fugeddaboudit.
