Fox Rejects "Notions" Like Recorded Temperature Data
| Wed Dec. 15, 2010 6:48 AM PST
Not that there's much mystery about what the folks at Fox News think about global warming, but a memo that Media Matters unearthed today really shows how backwards things over there, and that the denialist message is coming from the top. Here's the gist:
In the midst of global climate change talks last December, a top Fox News official sent an email questioning the "veracity of climate change data" and ordering the network's journalists to "refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question."
The directive, sent by Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, was issued less than 15 minutes after Fox correspondent Wendell Goler accurately reported on-air that the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization announced that 2000-2009 was "on track to be the warmest [decade] on record."
I can't decide which is more problematic—that they choose to dispute the very fact that it is warming at all, something that is rather hard to argue with, or that the memo came in response to a report from Copenhagen that accurately depicted the science. In either case, the memo is a good insight to how things work over at Fox, and why they've so successfully confused viewers about even the basic question of whether the planet is warming. Here's the memo:
Subject: Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data...
...we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.
Yep, at Fox, data like the recorded temperatures aren't facts—they're just "notions." It's so much less complicated that way!
Fox News D.C. Bureau Chief Bill Sammon e-mailed staffers last December to instruct them not to assert that the "planet has warmed (or cooled)" without "IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question."
Sammon's e-mail, obtained by Media Matters, came less than 15 minutes after Fox correspondent Wendell Goler reported on-air that the World Meteorological Organization at the U.N. said 2000-2009 was "on track to be the warmest [decade] on record."
The missive was sent three weeks after the so-called "Climategate" scandal broke and in the middle of the Copenhagen climate summit.
The Fox News bureau chief wrote to his staff that it was "not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies."
Climate change isn't the only topic where Sammon has told staffers to tip their coverage toward conservatives: he also instructed staffers to echo GOP talking points in the health care debate by using the term "government option" instead of "public option." Sammons defended the wording, told the Daily Beast that "public option" is a "vague, bland, undescriptive phrase," while "government option" is "simply an accurate, fair, objective term."
Read the full e-mail below.
Here's the segment that resulted in Sammon's e-mail:
Fox News Bureau Chief Told Staff To Cast Doubt On Climate Change
Fox News D.C. Bureau Chief Bill Sammon e-mailed staffers last December to instruct them not to assert that the "planet has warmed (or cooled)" without "IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question."
Sammon's e-mail, obtained by Media Matters, came less than 15 minutes after Fox correspondent Wendell Goler reported on-air that the World Meteorological Organization at the U.N. said 2000-2009 was "on track to be the warmest [decade] on record."
The missive was sent three weeks after the so-called "Climategate" scandal broke and in the middle of the Copenhagen climate summit.
The Fox News bureau chief wrote to his staff that it was "not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies."
Climate change isn't the only topic where Sammon has told staffers to tip their coverage toward conservatives: he also instructed staffers to echo GOP talking points in the health care debate by using the term "government option" instead of "public option." Sammons defended the wording, told the Daily Beast that "public option" is a "vague, bland, undescriptive phrase," while "government option" is "simply an accurate, fair, objective term."
Read the full e-mail below.
Here's the segment that resulted in Sammon's e-mail:
That night's Special Report with Bret Baier -- Fox's flagship news program -- featured another report by Goler on the Copenhagen conference. Anchor Bret Baier introduced the report by saying that as "'climategate-fueled skeptics continued to impugn global warming science, researchers today issued new and even more dire warnings about the possible effects of a warmer planet."
Goler's report featured a clip of Michel Jarraud of the World Meteorological Association explaining the recent finding that 2000-2009 "is likely to be the warmest on the record."
Appearing to echo Sammon's orders, Goler immediately followed this by saying that "skeptics say the recordkeeping began about the time a cold period was ending in the mid 1800s and what looks like an increase may just be part of a longer cycle."
After running a clip of American Enterprise Institute scholar Kenneth Green questioning the "historical context" of the WMO's climate findings, Goler then brought up the climategate emails:
GOLER: Meanwhile, the hacked or leaked e-mails from East Anglia University pushed the U.N. to once again defend its data. Scientists say it's consistent with that from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, and the U.N. secretary general says nothing in the e-mails cast doubt on the basic scientific message.BAN KI-MOON, U.N. SECRETARY GENERAL (video clip): That the climate change is happening much, much faster than we realized and we human beings are the primary cause.
Watch:
That night, on the same Special Report broadcast, correspondent James Rosen advanced the wildly misleading claim that climate scientists "destroyed more than 150 years worth of raw climate data."
By the time Sammon sent his email on December 8, it was already clear that "Climategate" was not only overblown, but also had no bearing on the validity of scientific theories about climate change.
- In a letter to Congress sent four days before Sammon's memo, 29 prominent scientists -- including 11 members of the National Academy of Sciences -- stated: "The body of evidence that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming is overwhelming. The content of the stolen emails has no impact whatsoever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming."
- On December 2, the prestigious science journal Nature stated: "Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real -- or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails."
- On November 25, the American Meteorological Society released a statement saying: "For climate change research, the body of research in the literature is very large and the dependence on any one set of research results to the comprehensive understanding of the climate system is very, very small. Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true -- which is not yet clearly the case -- the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited."
- On November 23, Peter Frumhoff, the director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a "lead author of the Fourth Assessment Report" by the IPCC said: "[O]ur understanding of climate science is based not on private correspondence, but on the rigorous accumulation, testing and synthesis of knowledge often represented in the dry and factual prose of peer-reviewed literature."
Several subsequent inquiries into the climategate emails did not find evidence of scientific malpractice that damages the credibility of CRU's climate science and also cleared the scientists of deceptively manipulating climate data.
Shortly after Sammon's memo, numerous media outlets, including the Associated Press,FactCheck.org, and PolitiFact.com also analyzed the emails and concluded that they did not undermine climate science.
Nonetheless, Fox's news and opinion programs relentlessly hyped the supposed scandal in order to cast doubt on the scientific case for climate change, both before and after Sammon's memo. Some lowlights:
- Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace repeatedly pushed climategate distortions, both before andafter Sammon's directive.
- On December 3, America's Newsroom host Bill Hemmer falsely claimed the emails showed scientists hiding "evidence of a decline in global temperatures."
- Online, Fox's website Fox Nation characterized the emails as "Global Warming's Waterloo."
- Neil Cavuto, Fox's "Senior Vice President of Business News" and host of Your World with Neil Cavuto, interviewed a filmmaker dressed as a polar bear during the Copenhagen conference and joined him in promoting "Climategate" distortions.
A month after Sammon sent his memo, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies released data confirming that 2009 was the second warmest year on record and marked the end of the warmest decade on record.
After spending weeks hyping the Climategate non-scandal, Special Report never mentioned the NASA report.
Media Matters contacted Sammon and Fox spokespeople for comment and we have not received a response.
Jocelyn Fon
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