Pruitt’s been gone for months, but his scandals still roll on. The Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani reported this week that when Pruitt was on Fox and Friends in the Spring of ‘17, his team worked closely with the president’s favorite “news” program to lay out the questions they would ask him, and even approved part of their script.
This, in the words of one former journalist and current journalism professor quoted in the article, “is a cardinal sin. It’s Journalism 101.” And how closely Fox worked with the government “would and should get you fired from any news organization with integrity.”
Fortunately for them, they worked for Fox.
But Fox News is hardly the only broadcast news organization that’s fundamentally failed to hold climate deniers like Scott Pruitt accountable to a basic level of honest.
Because while the Trump administration’s attempt to bury the NCA report on black friday backfired so badly that there were multiple stories about how badly it backfired, and it appeared on the front page of at least 140 newspapers across the country, it also broke into TV news.
Unfortunately, that may not have been much of a win. While print media seems aware that climate deniers are largely just liars for hire, TV news appears fine with letting them mislead audiences. (Including the President.)
All five of the major agenda-setting Sunday shows--NBC’s Meet the Press, CNN’s State of the Union, ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, and even Chris Wallace’s Fox News Sunday--covered climate change last Sunday. And while this was the first time all five covered climate change this year, which should have been cause for celebration, most gave the mic to deniers, which left audiences scratching their head.
As Emily Atkin at New Republic points out in a piece debunking all the lies TV news producers saw fit to broadcast, the news personalities on camera should’ve been prepared to refute the lies, because “the majority of falsehoods spread about climate change on Sunday’s news programs weren’t exactly new or novel.”
In fact, some of them were addressed in the report itself, like the Koch-funded “I’m not a scientist” talking head mocked by the Daily Show who mentioned the drop in temperatures in the last two years, or Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) saying the climate always changes. Answers to these overly simplistic talking points can be found in the FAQ, if not the surmised by the first sentence of the introduction: “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.” Or in Box 2.1 on natural variability, which explains in detail why a two-year drop in temperatures wouldn’t be worth mention.
Others, like Rick “My name is finally safe to Google” Santorum, repeated the conspiracy theory that scientists are just in it for the money.
While anyone who’s ever seen a university professor parking lot knows that the idea that scientists are in it for the gold is a stupid thing to say, it serves a more clever communications purpose- it undercuts the obvious point that those who deny climate change are largely doing so for the money.
Santorum is a paid CNN commentator. And he says just blatantly wrong, dumb things on purpose to deliberately misinform CNN’s audience.
Which should certainly get you fired from a news organization.
At least, any one with integrity...
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