Another is that newspapers are lodestones for conspiracists. Some malcontents read carefully woven plots into the simplest of news stories. They see an insidious bias whenever articles lack their point of view or include a view that they oppose. (I still have, buried in my desk, a lengthy criticism of a tiny article I wrote about Christmas, because I'd quoted a Catholic priest but not a Baptist minister.)

The humdrum reality of the newsroom is that reporters' deadlines are sometimes just too tight for the people they wish to interview. Behind many news stories are the people who don't return calls or who prefer to stay out of public debate. Some readers may believe editors carefully weigh up each story to ensure it matches a secret political agenda. In truth, the information that ends up in the paper is, in most cases, simply what was available at the time.

However, there's an obvious exception: The Daily Telegraph. (Yes, I'm dropping that naming convention.) In recent years, the Tele has waged war on climate science, playing down the effects (even the existence) of human-induced climate change. In particular, it opposes the idea that businesses that emit a lot of carbon dioxide should pay a small price for the harm caused, so as to discourage excessive pollution.

Last week, the Tele ran yet another front-page attack on the federal Climate Commission, dismissing its latest warnings with the headline ''Climate of fear''. The paper's editorial reasoned that people should treat climate change as a political issue, ''at least as much as it is a scientific issue''. (Pity poor Galileo: he'd be thrilled if he knew how far science had come in 400 years.)

''As a basic rule, we should always endeavour to care for our environment and to minimise our impact. At the same time, we should be cautious when assessing the power of that impact,'' the Tele concluded.

Now, let's go back five years to when the Coalition was in power and prime minister John Howard was on the cusp of introducing an emissions-trading scheme. The Tele's rather different view at the time? ''Regardless of the greater or lesser degree of our culpability in the problem, we must take action to reduce the poisonous consequences of our energy addiction … this is no longer a problem we can simply consign to 'the experts'. It's a problem for all of us - our very future is at stake.''

And this is what bugs me: the Tele is proving the malcontents and conspiracists right. Its anti-climate-action agenda isn't about healthy journalistic scepticism; it's duplicity. The paper's parent company, News Corp, sells investors an entirely different message. Its annual report trumpets how News Corp became a carbon-neutral company and, as a result, ''saved millions of dollars across its operations and supply chain''. Its energy website, 1 Degree, not only says there is a scientific consensus that humans are causing harmful climate change, it points out the national economic benefits of acting swiftly to cut emissions. As the then head of the company's Australian arm, John Hartigan, said last year: ''We are saving money by using less energy; it's an issue our employees are interested in and an issue our readers continue to want debated.''

So why doesn't the Tele share the company's own beliefs with its readers? Why churn out endless yarns about the carbon price whacking battlers, charities and so on, when it knows, from its own experience, that reducing carbon emissions is a way to make money, rather than lose it?

Climate change can be a little hard to grasp. It's a long-term trend and some of its symptoms may seem counter-intuitive: for example, it creates temperature volatility (hot and cold spells), heavy rainfall and storms. It's not just about droughts and a steady rise in heat.

But complexity is no excuse for treating readers like idiots.

Markus Mannheim edits The Public Sector Informant. Send your tips to aps6@canberratimes.com.au