Executives at Fox News have made it clear that their official editorial position on Climate Change is that it is either a hoax or unsettled science and that credible arguments exist on both sides of the debate. Fox News Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon, went so far as to issue a memo instructing all personnel to…
“…refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.”
Indeed. Unqualified, politically motivated critics have called into question the overwhelming evidence that Climate Change is occurring and that it is man-made. In fact, despite the characterization of environmental activists as “terrorists” by some at Fox News, 97% of of the scientists that actually study the climate agree that the planet is warming at an unprecedented rate and that this presents a crisis that requires immediate reformative action.
Nevertheless, Fox News continues to deliberately misinform their audience on behalf of the right-wing political establishment and the fossil fuel industry who finance their campaigns. The Union of Concerned Scientists did a study of the coverage of Climate Change by Fox News and found that nearly all (93%) of the reporting was misleading.
“The analysis finds that the misleading citations include broad dismissals of human-caused climate change, rejections of climate science as a body of knowledge, and disparaging comments about individual scientists. Furthermore, much of this coverage denigrated climate science by either promoting distrust in scientists and scientific institutions or placing acceptance of climate change in an ideological, rather than fact-based, context.”
So it should come as no surprise that this weekend Fox News aired a segment on Obama’s “Green Energy Agenda” with a brazenly biased video introduction that featured only critics of the President’s policies, including notorious climate denier Mark Morano. This led to anchor Doug McKelway’s peculiar remarks preceding an on-air debate:
“Dissent is indeed growing based in part on criticism from dozens of highly credited skeptics who say that temperature averages have stalled for the last fifteen years. In fact, some scientists from Russia are now predicting a new mini-ice age based upon the lack of sunspot activity.”
When was the last time that Fox News favorably cited Russians as credible experts on anything? That’s how desperate Fox is to cast doubt on a subject that almost every scientist agrees on.
The claim that temperature averages have stalled contradicts the fact that 2012 was the hottest year on record and that six of the last ten years were among the warmest ever recorded. So much for the “dozens” of skeptics whose credentials are unverifiable because McKelway declined to name any of them. Even if he had, it would be hard for them to compete with the hundreds of actual scientists on the other side.
Obviously McKelway was complying with the Sammon Directive to give equal weight to dubious hacks who have no background in climate science. Fox has a preconception on this issue that is written in stone and they are vigorously engaged in pushing their false narrative regardless of the facts. They have abandoned all sense of shame for their obliviousness to honest reporting to the extent that they even embrace sources that they would ordinarily ridicule. Can you image what Fox’s response would be to a Democrat who cited Russian scientists to support Climate Change? It would be a three day long scandal, at least, with the Democrat being accused of communist sympathies.
