Not Steve Doocy wanted to know if the newly discovered planets might have football.
Scientific American editor Michael Moyer was invited to appear on Fox News to discuss what glorious future science might bring us in the next 50 years. No problem,
with one major caveat.
About the only interesting thing that the scientific community is sure will happen in the next 50 years is that climate change is going to get worse, and that we’re going to have to deal with the impacts. So I put that as one of my talking points.
I understood that there was little chance the topic would make it into the show, but I’m not going to self-censor myself from the get-go. I also included as talking points some topics that we have recently covered in the magazine: robot drivers, gene therapy and rocket technology. The Fox producer came back and very politely and matter-of-factly said that we would have to replace the climate change item.
Well, sure. Talk about robot housewives or dinners that cook themselves—stuff that the Fox News audience can
relate to. Worldwide weather changes that are going to displace millions of people? Pfft. Get to the robots.
He tweeted some of his experiences there, including the Fox make-up artist who informed him that the missing Malaysia Airlines jet was "on a military base somewhere." "Kinda feel like I should take a shower," he tweeted afterwards.
Which is all fine; you appear on Fox and Friends, you pretty much know what you're in for, and in specific you ought to know by now that you are there to appeal to Fox's dumbest viewers on Fox's singular dumbest show.
But ya know, we've spent a lot of time trying to convince politicians that they shouldn't go on a network dedicated first and foremost to provably false propaganda. It legitimizes the network, it gives viewers the impression that they are indeed getting "both sides" of the story even though one side is there solely as object of demonization. I wonder if scientists and other experts should be more concerned with the same calculations. The Fox News propaganda against climate change—and propaganda is the right word to use here, and there's no way to dispute the virulent anti-science bent of the network—is extraordinarily damaging to the attempts to not cook the earth like a smoked sausage during our own lifetimes. Rather than participating in a heavily censored look at what "science" might be, perhaps it would be better for non-propagandists to dodge the network entirely, leaving them to stew in their own little pool of cringeworthy agitprop.
Given the continued willingness of politicians to go on a network that so broadly fudges the facts, it's probably a lost cause. Still, though—if you recognize the damage the network is doing, it seems dodgy to then go on the network and help them do it.