The eco-fanatics at Politico and The New York Times exploited a Republican Senator’s death to grave-stomp over his climate change skepticism.
How many Politico reporters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Who knows, but we do know it took four to write an insane, grave-stomping July 9 headline: “Former Sen. Jim Inhofe, who called climate change a 'hoax,' dead at 89.” The first paragraph of the piece was no better. In fact, it was about as cringeworthy as it gets. “Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who once brought a snowball onto the Senate floor as a brazen symbol of his denial of climate change, died on Tuesday. He was 89 years old.”
Compare Politico's treatment of Inhofe to its flowery 2019 obituary for Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro and its priorities become clear: "Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who defied U.S. for 50 years, has died."
Politico's ghastly report on Inhofe begs the question why any editor(s) using their prefrontal cortexes would okay this for publication. Apparently, someone at Politico had some kind of epiphany because its asinine headline was changed soon after the piece was published.
But Politico wasn’t alone. The New York Times followed suit with its own outrageous attack against Inhofe’s climate views in a separate obituary. “James M. Inhofe, Senator Who Denied Climate Change, Dies at 89,” The Times’s boorish headline read. The Times smeared Inhofe in its first paragraph as “arguably Washington’s most prominent denier of the established science of human-generated climate change.”
Unlike Politico, The Times only needed one author to paint itself as a collective of thoughtless climate ignoramuses. The Times, however, didn’t recognize the insanity of its headline as Politico did, and it remains unchanged as of the publication of its article.
Inhofe’s former staff director Andrew Wheeler blasted Politico and The Times for their utterly disrespectful treatment of the former senator in comments to MRC Business.
“It’s a sad commentary of modern life when some people rush to speak ill of the dead. It’s even worse when it’s the so-called mainstream media like the New York Times, and it’s particularly vile when they only speak ill of Republicans,” Wheeler said.
Politico — despite changing the initial barking mad headline — cast Inhofe as a comic book pollution villain stemming the tide of progress for Gaia’s faithful acolytes:
One of the GOP’s most vocal critics of environmental regulation and the science of climate change, Inhofe held vast sway over environmental policy during his time as chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — not only through his use of the gavel, but through his cultivation of staffers who went on to take key positions at EPA during the Trump administration and worked to roll back those rules Inhofe long maintained that climate change was a ‘hoax,’ going so far as to include it in the title of a 2012 book on the matter.
Politico is the same publication that hyped actually blocking the sun to save the planet from the climate boogeyman, so it’s no wonder it couldn’t resist dinging the legacy of a dead senator because he didn’t genuflect to the media’s pagan climate gods.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Politico at 703-647-7999 and The New York Times at 1 (800) 698-4637 and hold them to account for exploiting Senator Inhofe’s death to push nutty climate propaganda.
