“What will it take for Fox News to admit that humans are changing the climate?”
That’s the question posed in a new satirical television ad which aims to use a bit of humor to call out the network’s fueling of climate distortion “to the nation’s physical and economic peril.”
Produced by environmental advocacy organization Friends of the Earth (FoE) and Fenton Communications, the ad shows a supposed Fox News anchor discussing extreme weather events without drawing any links to climate change as water increasingly rises over her head.
An FoE press statement says the network rejected the ad, but that the group still expects it to be viewed many times thank to social media users sharing it with the hashtag #FOXFoolsOnClimate.
Watch the full ad below:
An FoE Facebook posting accompanying the video states: “This is Fox. Don’t be like Fox. Be a friend of the Earth and #actonclimate before it’s too late. “
Explaining the goal of the video, FoE U.S. President Erich Pica said, “We want to call out the nefarious role Fox News plays by keeping its audience confused about the climate threat to the country and world.”
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“Of course Fox News climate distortion is a big part of why Donald Trump and Republican elected officials also deny climate change, to the nation’s physical and economic peril,” he added.
“We call on James Murdoch to demand that his father and Fox News chief Roger Ailes stop distorting climate science,” Pica continued. “We know James Murdoch agrees that climate change is real and caused by humans. It’s time for him to take a stand, as the heir-apparent head of Fox.”
FoE says the ad is directed at the network because of its history of sometimes erroneous, sometimes distorting climate coverage—and there’s evidence to back up that claim.
A Media Matters analysis released this year, for example, found that in 2015, “the most newsworthy year for climate change in history,” Fox News roughly doubled its coverage of climate change compared to 2014.
Yet, as Andrew Seifter, climate and energy program director for Media Matters, explained, “The vast majority of that coverage included attacks on climate policies, or climate science denial.”
“So, people who watch Fox for their climate coverage got more of it, but they didn’t necessarily learn more from watching it,” he said.
And an analysis released in 2013 by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that Fox News segments on climate science were only 28 percent accurate. The organization explained in a statement at the time: “Fox News Channel hosts and guests were the most likely to accuse scientists of manipulating or hiding climate data, the analysis found, and hosts and guests often conveyed misinformation about scientific findings, including multiple misleading claims that global warming is not occurring.”
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