Fox News Distorts Climate Science; In Other News, the Pope Is Catholic
For anyone with an interest in journalism, its no surprise that Fox News Channel and the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal lean well to the right. Editorially, these two jewels of Rupert Murdochs News Corp. have a long history of denying human-induced global warming, in keeping with certain ideological interests.
New data support the anecdotes and conventional wisdom. At a midday panel on September 21 in New York Citys Science, Industry and Business Library, the Union of Concerned Scientists released results of an analysis quantifying the media outlets distortions of climate science.
In the six months from February to July 2012, the UCS searched for the terms climate change and global warming during primetime Fox News Channel programs, which consist of political commentary shows such as The OReilly Factor and Hannity.
The UCS found that, in 37 of 40 instances, Fox News programs misled viewers about climate sciencemainly, by broadly dismissing it. As an example, the UCS quotes an on-air statement from April 11, 2012: I thought we were getting warmer. But in the 70s, it was, look out, were all going to freeze. (The report didnt reveal the name of the actual source.) Fox News hosts and guests also mocked and disparaged statements from scientists and drowned out genuine scientific assertions with cherry-picked data and false claims.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/09/22/fox-news-distorts-climate-science/?WT_mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20120924