The website of taxpayer-subsidized Boston PBS superstation WGBH posted a commentary by local professor Dan Kennedy on December 3 provocatively titled "How Fox News Is Helping Destroy the Planet." Kennedy writes a column weekly for WGBHNews.com and is a panelist on their local show Beat the Press. He began: "Want to fight climate change? Tell your elderly relatives to turn off Fox News."
Kennedy cites the latest poll from the liberal Pew Research Center showing about two-thirds of U.S. adults (67%) say the federal government is doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change, and similar shares say the same about government efforts to protect air (67%) and water quality (68%). But older Americans have the lowest percentage thinking the government is "doing too little," and what do older Americans watch?
Earlier this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported on findings that showed rejection of climate science among ordinary people is uniquely American — and that Fox News was the likely reason.
Citing survey data, the author, Dana Nuccitelli, wrote that “Republicans who watch Fox News are more than twice as likely to deny human-caused climate change than Republican non-viewers, and 62 percent of Republicans watch Fox News.” Nuccitelli added that the data “suggests that the presence of Fox News and other conservative media outlets may be the primary explanation for why climate denial is more prevalent in the United States than in other developed countries.”
And it’s further proof that Rupert Murdoch, whose family runs Fox News, is one of the most dangerous people on the planet.
This is the same WGBH that produced a ten-hour series in 1990 titled Race to Save the Planet, in which Meryl Streep warned: “By the year 2000, that’s less than 10 years away, the Earth’s climate will be warmer than it’s been in over 100,000 years. If we don’t do something, there will be enormous calamities in a very short time.” Did the "climate science" work out?
Speaking of terrible predictions, the same show -- which included no skeptics in ten hours -- included Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, who forecast doom on the 1990s: “The future food security of the world is becoming more and more questionable. We could see food security replace military security as the principal preoccupation of many governments in the world during the 1990s.”
But never mind, Professor Kennedy thinks Fox is the station distributing the misinformation. As usual, the leftist here thinks that when the Left doesn't get what it wants, "democracy" is undermined.
The role of Fox News in preventing serious action on climate change shouldn’t be underestimated. From propping up the Trump presidency to mocking science as a bastion of liberal elitism, Fox is hastening the day when parts of the planet will become uninhabitable.
The Pew survey shows that a majority of Americans wants to do something serious about climate change. It also shows that the same Foxified minority keeping Trump in office is blocking the wishes of the majority. It’s further proof that our media system, like our electoral system, is undermining our democracy.
One thing that undermines democracy is taking taxpayer money from conservatives and handing it over to left-wing professors to tell everyone the conservatives are destroying Earth.
