The media watchdog site Media Matters for America, has an ongoing series following lies and distortions about climate change and AGW in the media.
Take a gander at their recent roundup, particularly of the lies made by Fox news anchors and reporters, and you begin to see why so many people don’t believe the earth is warming or think it is cooling!
Fox News averaged 2.187 million total viewers in primetime for the year [2009], up 7% from 2008 and enough to place 3rd among all cable channels. In total day, the network averaged 1.192 million total viewers.
Just a short list of silly misinformed arguments outright lies recently made by Fox:
1) It’s cold outside = the earth is cooling!
2) The CIA is diverting funds from the war on terrorism to climate change research!
3) The Earth is cooling! Most scientists don’t believe humans are causing global warming (HEY! Wait a minute. Isn’t there an inconsistency in this argument?! The earth is cooling AND humans are not causing the warming?)
5) 2009 was the coldest year on record!
See this list of documented lies and distortions on Fox news programs since Dec. 23, 2009 (just in the last two weeks!):
- Hannity touts ice sculptors who cited cold temperatures to claim that global warming “hasn’t exactly reached Alaska”
January 07, 2010 10:10 pm - Big global warming misinformation from Breitbart’s BigJournalism.com
January 07, 2010 5:29 pm - Fox & Friends funnels Exxon-funded NCPPR press release claiming CIA is “spying on icebergs instead of terrorists”
January 07, 2010 10:01 am - Doocy’s weather report: “It’s not global warming, I’ll tell you that!” January 06, 2010 7:48 am
- Hannity repeats false claim that 2009 was “coldest year on record”
January 05, 2010 10:11 pm - Parroting Bozell, Dobbs calls CRU emails “one of the biggest frauds in the history of modern science, if not the biggest”
January 05, 2010 4:16 pm - Fox’s Doocy: “I wonder if Al Gore is shivering … global warming thing is really starting to kick in”
January 05, 2010 2:26 pm - Doocy on cold weather: “That global warming thing is really kicking into high gear, isn’t it?”
January 05, 2010 8:21 am - Monckton on Beck: “We’re going to go after” IPCC members “one by one”
December 23, 2009 1:14 pm - Monckton on Beck: “vast majority of scientists around the world” don’t believe “we have much to do with” global warming
December 23, 2009 12:58 pm - Beck fill-in Joe Pagliarulo: In Michigan, “[i]t was 14 degrees. … [I]f that’s climate change, it’s changing for the colder”
December 23, 2009 10:32 am
See some of the video clips Media Matters has collected below:
