A Fox News Climate Disinformation Channel Is the Last Thing We Need

The media giant is launching a 24-hour weather news channel.

Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/ZUMA

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. 

Americans have a big appetite for news about the weather, and climate change is making weather events more frequent and extreme. Now, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation, a media empire with a long history of peddling climate disinformation, is entering the world of 24-hour weather coverage.

The billionaire media mogul plans to launch Fox Weather later this year, with the intent that it will rival the popular Weather Channel. It has been poaching meteorologists from other networks, The New York Times reported this week.

Scientists and watchdog groups are understandably wary of the new venture, anticipating that the network’s weather arm will prove just as skewed, politicized, and detached from reality as its cable news programming. Fox News commentators and their guests are constantly downplaying and denying the global threat of climate change, even amid historic and deadly heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, and drought.

Susan Joy Hassol, director of the nonprofit organization Climate Communication and a co-author of three National Climate Assessments, has spent years working with journalists and TV meteorologists to better communicate the connections between extreme weather and human-caused climate change. Given Fox’s record, she’s extremely concerned about what the new weather-focus channel will mean for the public’s understanding of the crisis and its impacts.

“Unless Fox changes its stripes, this could be a real move in the wrong direction, not only failing to make the appropriate linkages but shouting them down and providing more disinformation to an audience that trusts them,” she said.

Hassol noted a 2010 University of Maryland survey that found that the more a person consumed Fox News, the more likely they were to be misinformed about climate change. A more recent Public Citizen analysis found that 86 percent of climate segments that aired on Fox News in 2018 included claims dismissing or casting doubt on the global threat.

Many climate experts and activists view the network as little more than a mouthpiece for fossil fuel industry talking points―an industry that’s not only played an outsized role in exacerbating global warming but spent decades spreading disinformation in order to stymie efforts to address greenhouse gas emissions.

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, told E&E News that Fox News has been “the greatest promoter of climate change disinformation over the past two decades.”

Its popular commentators like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham have bombarded their audiences with conspiratorial claims about how the idea of climate change is a ploy to destroy the economy and control lives. Prominent climate deniers like Steve Milloy, former tobacco and coal lobbyist, are regular guests on Fox News.

Just this week Milloy, a Fox contributor and former member of the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, appeared on Ingraham’s show to discuss the ”war on air conditioning” and bemoan smart electric meters and electric vehicles.

“Left uses climate change to control our lives,” read a chyron during the segment.

The new weather channel will be independent of Fox’s other networks, and a spokesperson told the Times that its “dedicated team of leading meteorologists and experts” will offer “in-depth reporting surrounding all weather conditions.”

John Morales, a meteorologist for NBC in Miami, is not as concerned about the channel’s unique potential for climate denial.

“Fox News weathercasters are reputable and some, like Maria Molina, have gone on to accomplished careers in atmospheric research,” he told HuffPost. “As science communicators, broadcast meteorologists should seek not just to deliver weather forecasts and warnings but to educate their audiences about our changing climate. Whether a Fox weather network would frown on that is yet to be seen. If so, they wouldn’t be the first news outlet failing to adequately cover the climate crisis. There is huge room for improvement across the cable and broadcast news spectrum.”

The links between human-induced climate change and extreme weather are undeniably clear. A study published Wednesday, for example, concluded that last week’s grueling and deadly heat wave across the Pacific Northwest and Canada would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change.

Ignoring, downplaying, or brushing off such connections would be a dangerous disservice—and come at a time when the nation and planet can least afford more disinformation and delay.

“We know that communication is effective when it consists of simple, clear messages repeated often by trusted sources. Fox News is nothing if they’re not good at that,” Hassol said. “Surveys find that Republicans trust Fox News more than any other major news network. We know we have a partisan gap on climate change, and this stands to only make that worse.”

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate