Last week, a report bounced around conservative websites alleging that the mainstream media is obviously biased against Trump because FOIA requests to the EPA spiked after he took over.
This EPA defense play came from Brent Scher at the Free Beacon, a fake news website whose chairman lobbied on behalf of the Kochs (as well as Taiwan…) and which ran a piece in 2014 explaining why it would “make more sense to worship the Koch Brothers” than “Earth Mother.”
While the Kochs have formally disavowed funding the Free Beacon’s parent organization, a CAP knock-off called the Center for American Freedom, that doesn’t mean this Trump EPA defense story lacks any Kochnections. Prior to joining the Free Beacon, Scher worked for the Koch’s American Enterprise Institute.
That said, in Scher’s defense, his initial story simply tallies the number of FOIA requests mainstream outlets made before and after Trump came to power, leaving the inference of judgement to others. The New York Times made 13 FOIA requests in Obama’s second term, compared 59 requests post-Trump. The Washington Post only FOIA’ed Obama’s EPA once, compared to 43 times for Trump. ABC, CNN, Politico and others show a similar jump.
Though Scher doesn’t accuse the media of being biased, “Media Bias” is one of the tags used, and that’s certainly the angle onto which the deniersphere latched. “Media Bias?” the Koch’s Daily Caller’s headline questioned, while Breitbart’s Sean Moran wrote that media “took a large interest in transparency at the EPA since Trump took office.”
Jazz Shaw at Hot Air went so far as to ask “aside from simple, pervasive bias, can you propose any other explanation to explain this disparity?” (FYI, Hot Air is part of the Town Hall network, a site created by the Koch’s Heritage Foundation before being sold to the conservative Salem Communications.)
Indeed, what reason could possibly explain why media would request more information from the EPA after someone whose emails showed an “often-chummy relationship” with fossil fuel companies and who had years before been outed for having a “secretive alliance” with energy companies was appointed to head the agency?
Trump’s EPA plays nice with conservative fake news outlets like these, so it may be easy enough for them to ignore the fact that the agency has engaged in “bullying tactics against news organizations” like calling a reporter “trash” or physically shoving a woman out of the building. It's all part of a pattern of “hostility to the press” that Mother Jones’s Rebecca Leber and others have experienced. This hostility would certainly explain why reporters are using FOIA to get information they are otherwise being denied.
Apparently we found the answer to what, besides bias, would explain why the Trump administration has been hit with so many more FOIAs.
They’re trying to hide their lethal and illegal agenda from public scrutiny.
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