Last week, a thick blanket of wildfire smoke covered the northeast US, plunging NYC into an apocalyptic-looking orange and red haze and covering DC with a slightly less dystopian filter of dismal gray. The health impacts of breathing that smoke are obvious to anyone who got a lung full of soot and immediately began coughing it back up, giving the East Coast a taste of what West/Left/Best coasters have had to swallow for some years now.
Mainstream media is predisposed to treat issues impacting NYC and DC with more attention than those regularly occurring in the West, so it did a pretty good job of covering the many dangerous health effects of breathing in smoke and smog. In response, deniers worked double time to distract and deny with disinformation.
Predictably, Fox News led the charge and platformed air-pollution-denier Steve Milloy, who was once fired from Fox for failing to disclose his tobacco industry work. Amusingly, many pointed out that the man who professionally lied about the health impacts of secondhand smoke before a career change to professionally lying about the health impacts of fossil fuel smoke was probably not the best choice to provide unbiased or accurate commentary on the health impacts of wildfire smoke. As it turns out, all three sources of smoke are bad!
Whether you're burning a "low-tar" cigarette, "clean" coal, oil, diesel, methane ("natural") gas, or a Canadian forest, the resulting soot is extremely hazardous to human health, as the tiny bits of char, or particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5 in the technical jargon), work their way deep into lung tissue where they can cause or worsen respiratory issues, and even all the way into the bloodstream.
The fact that tobacco, fossil fuels, and forests all emit this dangerous pollutant when burned is the through line for Steve Milloy's whole career as a denier. His "JunkScience" project began and still serves as an effort to deny the harms of secondhand smoke and prevent regulations on smoking. When that failed, he took his PM2.5 denial to coal companies, and worked for them to deny the science showing the harms of their product. He attempted to integrate his approach into the federal government during the Trump administration, though thankfully even there his rank denial was too unpalatable to survive long-term.
That certainly hasn't stopped him from making right-wing media appearances, however, and even worse, Milloy was hardly the only professional polluter apologist platformed by Fox "News."
Fox ran the climate-denying Wall Street Journal's climate disinfo to downplay the link between the Canadian wildfires and climate change and distort the multiple studies making the connection along with NOAA.
The network had "walking conflict of interest" David Bernhardt on to defend his clients by denying the climate component and blaming forest management instead, which is a classic way to both reject climate solutions and help out the timber industry that's eager to chop down the forests to harvest timber in the name of wildfire prevention.
Fox also handed the mic to Koch crony Daniel Turner of Power the Future, the polluter lobby shop that denies its own lobbying, and he immediately attacked AOC, because of course. Last and definitely least, the Ingraham Angle platformed Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Watts, who also belittled Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a "bartender turned politician" and contrasted himself as an expert without an agenda who just looks at the data.
For the record (and please forgive us for the ivory tower snobbery that we're only indulging because Anthony broached the issue to trade on his supposed expertise), Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez worked her way through college, yes, as a bartender, to graduate cum laude with a double bachelor’s in international relations and economics from Boston University, before being elected to the US House of Representatives.
In contrast, Anthony Watts, who wanted Fox viewers to believe that he, not "bartender turned politician" AOC, was the ultimate arbiter of climate science, has yet to earn a university degree despite being decades older than the subject of his derision whose credentials he minimizes. And after a career on local TV news reading the weather off a teleprompter, Watts is now in retirement as a paid employee of the Heartland Institute, a group that has taken funding from the fossil fuel and tobacco industries to deny the harmful impacts of fossil fuels and tobacco.
The tobacco and fossil fuel industries have spent decades seeding disinformation operations across the media landscape, so Fox News had plenty of options for people to bring on to mislead viewers about climate change and the health impacts of breathing in smoke and soot, the dangers of which have been regulated at least since at least the age of King Edward I, who banned the burning of "sea coales" in London because of pollution during his reign around the year 1300. For over 700 years, we've understood that breathing in smoke is bad, but that's not stopping Fox.
And while we might not go quite so far as his successor, King Edward II, who tortured those who polluted, by the late 1300s, the more reasonable mind of Richard II simply levied a tax to reduce the pollution.
What a concept! Someone should tell Republicans about it; surely they're not more anti-science and willing to sacrifice the lives of their constituents than literal monarchs in the Dark Ages, right?
…Right?
