How Green? Is Fox News?

The folks at Fox News have published a new environmentally focused web site called “How Green?” The site appears to be in the early stages of development with just a few articles posted, mostly re-posts from Associated Press.

Once again, Fox News is demonstrating a measure of hypocrisy that flies off the scale. The right-wing network still regularly hosts Global Warming deniers, and its top anchors scoff at what many of them call environmental “hysteria.” For example…

Sean Hannity: One of the reasons we’re so energy dependent is because of the global warming hysteria and extremism.

In an article on Foxnews.com, James O’Brien, a professor from Florida State University, continued the hysteria theme saying…

“Global climate change is occurring in many places in the world,” O’Brien said. “But everything that’s attributed to global warming, almost none of it is global warming” […] He called sea level changes a “major scare tactic used by the global warming people.”

And Jennifer Lawinski of Fox News wrote this bit of nonsense: Children’s Books Use Christmas to Push Global Warming Agenda. These dangerous tomes include one wherein Santa is so moved by a young boy’s efforts to save his adopted polar bear, that he decides to re-use last year’s wrapping paper, recycle toys and start using wind to generate power for his toy shop. OH NOOO!

In an effort to support her premise, Lawinski quoted a critic of the book “Santa Goes Green”:

“The global climate change alarmists are now trying brainwash our kids by infusing their unproven and baseless climate change rhetoric into Santa books,”

Was this critic a scientist? A climate expert? An authority on literature? Nope. It was a review written by a visitor to Amazon.com. In fact, it was the whole review. And to be clear, Amazon permits anyone to post comments on their products regardless of their credibility, or lack thereof. In all likelihood, this reviewer didn’t even read the book. This is the authority that Lawinski cited to buttress her reporting. And it’s typical of Fox News who often imbue partisan propagandists and ignorant nobodies with qualifications they haven’t earned and don’t deserve. (see Joe the Plumber).

But what’s occurring here is more than hypocrisy – it’s schizophrenia. News Corp Chairman, Rupert Murdoch has become an outspoken advocate of reducing greenhouse gasses. He accepts that Global Warming is a real concern and that human behavior has an impact on climate. He pledged the corporation to reduce its carbon footprint 10 percent by 2012 via energy reduction initiatives, and to become carbon-neutral by 2010, by buying carbon offsets.

Despite that commitment, Murdoch’s minions still vigorously oppose any suggestion that there is a climate crisis that demands our attention. Everyone from Hannity, to Brit Hume, to Neil Cavuto, to Steve Doocy, routinely dismiss the subject as Junk Science. And to top it off, a poll on the How Green? website that asks “Is Global Warming Real?” presently has a 63% majority answering “No.”

That makes it pretty difficult to square Fox’s eco-activity with the views of its staff and audience. Their overt hostility toward the environmental agenda makes their token gestures seem all the more cynical and exploitative. Most likely, these fleeting eruptions of green are just an attempt to curry favor with millions of concerned conservationists. Fox thinks this will give them cover so that they can claim to be responsible citizens. And if it weren’t for the fact that they contradict themselves at every turn, it just might have worked.

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4 thoughts on “How Green? Is Fox News?

  1. I agree. The author of ‘Santa Goes Green’ just wanted everyone to know that she was trying to create a little awareness for our youth, so that they may care for our environment for future generations to come. She does so in a delightful, gentle way, not brainwashing in any way, as some have so eloquently put it on the negative comments on Amazon about the book. In fact they aren’t even reviews of the book, but merely voicings of their negative reaction to any idea that we humans may be contributing anything at all to the negative impact we have on our environment.

    But wow! Put Green in the title and everyone goes balistic and all of the ignorant-head-in-the-sand people pull their heads out of the sand long enough to comment and run right back to the sand and see how much further they can bury themselves.

    • Exactly. These climate crisis deniers are truly deluded. I can understand why an Exxon exec would take these positions in pursuit of their own greed, but what purpose does it serve anyone else?

      It may be they are religious zealots like James Watt, Reagan’s EPA administrator, who believed that the end days were coming, so it didn’t matter what we did to the environment.

  2. Or how about this, global warming isn’t the major deal people are making out of it and the people who do believe it are the deluded ones? Remember the 1970’s. Oh no, New York’s going to be full of glaciers. Fast forward to now, oh no, New York’s going to be underwater.

    Anyone who can’t see this is a cycle is truly ignoring science in it’s most basic of forms. So, in 30 years, will the world be underwater and frozen? I better go stock up.

    • Over 900 hundred peer-reviewed studies in science journals certify the truth about the climate crisis. There’s not a single one that takes the opposite position. And the 70’s thing you refer to was a single paragraph in a non-science magazine that was never the view of the meteorological community. It’s so funny that the deniers keep bringing that up.

      I guess delusion is in the eye of the deluded.

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