Leaked Fox News memo reveals network’s anti-science bias in climate coverage
by Union of Concerned Scientists, December 15, 2010
WASHINGTON – Media Matters today released an email from Fox News Washington Managing Editor Bill Sammon in which he urged news staff to highlight criticisms of climate science whenever they mention the fact that the Earth is warming.
The email was not surprising to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which tracks climate misinformation on Fox News and other media outlets, but it is nonetheless revealing. While UCS has had productive interactions with a number of Fox News staff members, the network’s coverage regularly gives unwarranted weight to anti-scientific claims regarding climate change.
UCS has asked Fox News to improve its poor coverage of climate science. NewsCorp, which owns Fox News, has a stated policy to “engage our audiences and enable them to find ways to reduce carbon emissions in their own lives.” Sammon’s email, which urges reporters to misinform their audiences about climate change, is an apparent violation of that policy.
To date, UCS activists have submitted more than 35,000 letters to Rupert Murdoch, the owner of NewsCorp, urging him to stop allowing false claims about climate science on Fox News and in the newspapers he owns. The letters are part of UCS’s Got Science? campaign, which debunks misinformation about climate change by governments, corporations and the news media.
NewsCorp and Murdoch have not responded.
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