Fox News is Biased on climate change. This should surprise no one, though the capitalization probably does.
Since it was revealed in 2010 that the Washington editor of Fox News sent a memo directing reporters to inject doubt into its climate coverage, it’s been obvious that the outlet fails to live up to its “Fair and Balanced” tag line. In fact, most would say it’s not even trying.
Which is why no gasps were heard when Bernie Sanders called out Fox for its dedication to keeping “the debate” about climate change alive long after it’s been settled among scientists.
Now, one may be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, since it’s been six years since that memo was sent. Perhaps in the years since, Fox has come around. For example, in a story about Hurricane Hermine on FoxNews.com, there was a sentence about rising sea levels making the storm more damaging and two quotes from real climate scientists Mann and Oppenheimer! Was this a sign of progress? Is the scientific consensus now so strong even Fox News has gotten on board?
Nope. As documented by Media Matters, the original story was from the Associated Press, and before long the climate connection was removed entirely. An editor at Fox apparently felt the need to cut AP’s climate context and the comments by scientists.
This deliberate choice to remove pertinent information means Fox is not just a little biased in how it presents climate-related stories and how it chooses to cover (or not cover) climate science. It’s not that they’re guilty of the same type of inescapable bias that all outlets, and indeed all people, have for their own preferences or worldviews. And it’s not, as Bret Baier suggests in an interview, that people confuse the spin of Fox opinion content with unbiased reporting. Instead, this reveals an intentional effort to tell its readers less than it knows. Which is why they’re not just little-b-biased like everyone, but big-B-Biased.
Yes, we just made that up. But it’s important to draw these sorts of distinctions because there are those who say that all media is biased, to sell ad space or otherwise find ways to monetize online media via clickbait for example. And in some ways that’s true. But when one distinguishes between the implicit bias of mainstream media with the explicit Bias of Fox and friends, it becomes clear that the “But all media is biased!” defense is a false equivalence. Some mainstream outlets may subtly skew liberal, but it’s rare that they are shown to edit out important information or insert doubt with the consistency and severity of Fox.
For example, while USA Today’s op-ed editor’s own bias about climate science might mean he’s more sympathetic to denier pieces, that’s minor compared to the big-B Bias of the WSJ’s decades-long history of misleading opinion page coverage.
At a time when legitimate media is outgrowing the false balance-type issues with climate reporting, the demonstrated Bias of Murdoch Media provides a warning. Because as even further-right outlets seem to rise in importance (e.g. Brietbart) we must remember that the bias that’s been exposed is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
But will the world's real icebergs melt before the metaphorical iceberg of media bias?
Hopefully not, though you probably won’t hear it from Fox.
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