If we told you that a media outlet had run a fulsome apology for an opinion piece it published, you would naturally assume that was the end of the matter, right?

Only if you were unfamiliar with what passes for protocol in some corners of the local blogosphere.

True, the apology in question featured a snippy-sounding headline (“The law won (again)”), but the words underneath were clear and to the point. Gareth Renowden, a commentator with AUT Media, which publishes the magazine Idealog, had written an online piece about the departure of Listener contributor Dave Hansford, author of the magazine’s “Ecologic” column since last November and the victim, it was suggested, of some kind of vast right-wing conspiracy overseen by Listener editor Pamela Stirling. The website now acknowledged that the piece it published was deficient.

The original item had to do with fuss caused at the weekly magazine in the wake of a March 23 column in which Hamsford rather pompously questioned media coverage of what he described as “climate change deniers.”

Hansford, a photographer who has come to print journalism relatively late in his career and who has since made something of a beat for himself in challenging sectors of the scientific community (an earlier piece written by Hansford for the Forest & Bird magazine disparaging NIWA ended up with the publication having to publish a grovel and retraction), specifically fingered lobbyists from the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition whom, he felt, have lately received far too much sympathetic air-time in the business pages of the national media.

The column singled out the mileage Hansford believes Bryan Leyland and NBR contributor Owen McShane have apparently enjoyed in questioning the reality of global warming.

Subsequently the Listener gave Leyland a right of reply alongside a counter-argument from an academic from the University of Canterbury who more or less supported the thesis of the original column. Around this point Hansford was also dropped as a columnist.

For more perspectives on the tempest go here, here  or here. The last item, reported by John Drinnan in the New Zealand Herald, is especially relevant because some of it riffs on the theme of the offending AUT Media column, which questioned Stirling’s professionalism in handling the affair, a barb that appears to have prompted the Listener editor, whom we know slightly and who has never struck us as rabidly right-wing in way, shape or form, to dispatch a letter to AUT from m’learned friends.

In its apology, AUT also acknowledged that such implications were incorrect:

"Hot Topic and AUT Media Ltd accept that The Listener and its editor have a strong commitment to environmental issues, and that there was no basis for any of the criticisms expressed on this site of either The Listener or its editor, or of the editorial integrity and independence of The Listener. Hot Topic and AUT Media Ltd unreservedly withdraw those statements an apologise to The Listener and to Pamela Stirling for the distress caused by our publication."

On the scientific merits of the original column we remain cheerfully agnostic, tending as we do to be convinced with whichever point of view on the environment that we last heard eloquently expressed. Although we would note that many other apocalyptic scenarios uncritically entertained by the media in recent years (cf the SARS outbreak, the imminent bird flu pandemic, et al) have often not stood up well over time, and that the appellation “climate change denier” drifts awfully close to breaking Godwin’s law.

What strikes us as more intriguing here is the near-universal consensus that Stirling had no right to seek an apology after being professionally smeared, with the general view apparently being that people who write weblogs are somehow not constrained by the same courtesies that members of the dreaded “mainstream media” are always required to keep in mind.

Weirder still has been the behaviour of AUT Media, first in acknowledging its professional shortcomings on this occasion but then opening up a comment section directly underneath for a number of contributors to disparage Stirling’s actions in language far nastier than the original offending column. And these are the same loving folk who claim to have God — or absolute science at any rate — on their side. Heaven spare us.