The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a major Synthesis Report this week, explaining as patently as possible, for one last time before it's too late to take action, that we can't build any more fossil fuel infrastructure if we want any hope of meeting the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to under 1.5° C.
Initial reactions from deniers span from lazy partisan gossip coverage at Fox and the Washington Times, to lazy and racist coverage at The Daily Caller.
We'll start with Fox, which ran at least three pieces about the IPCC’s report on its website. The first was a straightforward write-up of the UN press release, published on Monday afternoon. Then on Monday evening, Fox ran a second piece, this time dressing up a bunch of right-wing tweets as a story with the headline "UN report predicting climate catastrophe in 2030 met with mockery: 'Every single prediction' has been 'wrong.'" Why do your own reporting when you can just crowdsource old disinfo from your right-wing propaganda-filled Twitter feed?
To complete the lazy trifecta, Fox ran a third piece on Tuesday morning, which just extensively quoted an interview that climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe gave to PBS, in which she debunks the disinformation Fox ran the day prior. Hayhoe explains, "The previous predictions were not wrong. The uncertainty is us. The predictions were for what will happen depending on the choices we make."
That's a nice summary of how disinfo outlets initially "report" on these kinds of releases. They mostly just quote other people paid by conservative billionaires to spread conservative propaganda, or lazily lift the work real journalists did elsewhere, knowing that their audience won’t treat the woman climate scientist with the respect and deference her expertise deserves.
Over at The Washington Times, we can see what the opinion side of these "news" rooms puts out to inform their readers about the fate of the planet's ability to sustain human civilization: column-length versions of the sort of stupid tweets that Fox quoted.
According to columnist Cheryl Chumley, the "good news" is that UN Secretary-General António Guterres is "a socialist-slash-Marxist" and therefore like all socialist/Marxists, is "an inherent liar," so you can "yawn and go back to the PlayStation. Or to the mulching. It is spring, after all."
Yes, Chumley draws on the century-old industry propaganda tactic (recently documented in Naomi Oreskes’ and Eric Conway's new book "The Big Myth") of calling anyone who stands in the way of unchecked profits a socialist and communist, because if it's worked for 100 years, why change it up now?
Well, apparently there are also new ways to be terrible these days, as evidenced by Chumley's comrade in denial Michael Bastasch, a Koch-trained political operative disguised as a journalist working as the Koch-funded Daily Caller's managing editor.
Bastasch's column on Tuesday ramped up the propaganda, because that's what you do when you have no facts. "The UN's newest climate report is a woke dumpster fire masquerading as science," reads the headline, informed by Bastasch's very scientific analysis. "Variations of the words 'equity' and 'inequity' appear 31 times in the 36-page document," according to Bastasch, putting the whole of all his "Ctrl+F" reporting skills on display.
"Variations of 'inclusive' and 'inclusion' appear 17 times," he continues, and "the document even mentions 'colonialism' and repeatedly refers to climate and social 'justice' for 'marginalized' groups." If you read that and thought, 'well, good!' then you are not in Bastasch's target audience.
"'Equity,' if you remember," he explains for those who are a little slow on the manufactured outrage uptake, "is that word then-candidate Kamala Harris famously described as a system where 'we all end up in the same place.' Sounds a lot like socialism, doesn't it?"
No, but that's only because we actually know what equity and socialism mean, and aren't just running racist propaganda to cover for our polluting funders.