Welcome to Debunker, a weekly breakdown of misleading (and sometimes flat-out wrong!) news from the worlds of science, health, and more—for Beast Inside members only.
President Trump’s 2020 campaign arm sent a memo to major news networks Monday, calling on them to consider dropping prominent Democrats as guests for “lying to the American people” about the Mueller investigation.
The letter targeted Democrats like Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and DNC Chairman Tom Perez, and argued that networks should consider if their previous “outrageous and unsupported” claims merited further appearances.
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But that might not be a rule that Trump would want applied to some conservative talking heads. That’s especially true when it comes to two of the most divisive science issues of 2019, abortion and climate change—issues on which conservatives like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and the cast of Fox & Friends have pushed information that definitely clears the bar of “outrageous and unsupported.”
Here’s an exhaustive—but by no means complete—look at which pundits might not make the cut by the Trump campaign’s proposed standard.
Abortion
In early 2019, Democratic lawmakers backed two pieces of pro-choice legislation that drew mainstream conservative ire: Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Reproductive Health Act, and a bill introduced by delegate Kathy Tran in Virginia. Both pieces of legislation aimed to make it easier for women to obtain in abortion in the final months of their pregnancy—which conservatives quickly and falsely spun as “infanticide.”
“You can get an abortion in the seventh month of pregnancy, the eighth month of pregnancy, and the ninth month of pregnancy,” Sean Hannity said on his eponymous Fox News show on Jan. 28, six days after Cuomo signed the bill into law on Roe v. Wade’s anniversary. “That would be called infanticide.”
He repeated that claim on his show for the next two days, Media Matters for America reports. Laura Ingraham joined in, slamming the Democrats for what she called a “full-on embrace of infanticide,” as did Pete Hegseth, who called New York’s new law “an infanticide law, really.”
“Infanticide” might sound scary, but it only refers to the crime of killing an infant within the year after it’s born. It has nothing to do with a third-trimester abortion, which the procedure the pundits described.
But some pundits took the criticism a step further, arguing that the bills would allow women to recklessly decide they wanted an abortion moments before giving birth for no apparent reason. On the second day of Hannity’s infanticide rant, Fox’s Ainsley Earhardt went off on a tirade of her own.
After Steve Doocy informed an incredulous Brian Kilmeade that the bill would allow abortions in the third trimester, Earhardt claimed that “that would be me getting pregnant, and—being nine months pregnant and walking into the hospital and saying, ‘I don't want the child anymore.’”
“I mean it's—I can't even believe that this is happening,” she added.
It’s not. Both the New York law and the Virginia bill (which never passed) only allow for third-trimester abortions if the health of the woman or the fetus is at risk.
Fox did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
To be fair, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam didn’t help his cause when defending Tran’s bill. When asked on a radio show about what would happen if a child was born after an attempted abortion, Northam responded that “the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
Northam later clarified that he wasn’t advocating for infanticide—but his words reinvigorated the conservative firestorm, even prompting legislators to introduce the redundantly named Born-Alive Infants Protection Act.
The Act moved to outlaw infanticide in the case of failed abortions, which is already illegal. Because of that, 44 Democrats refused to back it—prompting Earhardt to misleadingly claim that they’re “OK with letting the child die.”
“It's just interesting that so many of those individuals care about the children and the women down on the border, but yet, when it comes to our own babies being born alive, they want to make the decision not to allow that child to survive?” she said.
The Climate
The most pervasive of conservative climate claims is that if it’s cold outside, there’s no such thing as global warming. It’s been publicized by radio host Mike Slater, who said that global warming is a “hard sell when it is 6 degrees outside,” and Pete Hegseth, who jokingly encouraged Trump to take credit for solving it after a bomb cyclone killed 22 people. Unsurprisingly, Sean Hannity’s in on it, too, as is Trump.
The problem? There’s a huge difference between weather, the meteorological conditions we experience each day, with climate, a measurement of long-term changes in the weather.
Although we might experience bouts of cold weather, the data is clear: The earth is getting warmer. According to NASA data, the four hottest years on record are 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.
“Temperatures are on average getting higher all over the globe, in all seasons,” Astrid Caldas, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told The Daily Beast via email. “Data do not lie, people do.”
Some pundits, however, claim that we shouldn’t be listening to scientists like Caldas in the first place. That includes former Sen. Rick Santorum, who was widely mocked for claiming that climate change is a concept invented by researchers who want to make money.
“If there was no climate change, we’d have a lot of scientists looking for work,” he said on CNN. “The reality is that a lot of these scientists are driven by the money they receive.”
Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay made similar comments on CNN Right Now, arguing that the National Climate Assessment Report is “an alarmist political document” that provides “nothing more than a rehash of age-old 10- to 20-year assumptions made by scientists that get paid to further the politics of global warming.”
Michael Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Penn State, says that’s ridiculous—and hypocritical.
“This is a perfect demonstration of the psychological phenomenon of ‘projection,’” Mann told The Daily Beast via email. “Climate change deniers are trying to distract people from the fact that it is in fact THEY who are getting paid very large sums of money from a BILLIONS OF DOLLARS public relations campaign by fossil fuel interests and those who do their bidding to attack the science, confuse the public, and prevent any policy solutions.”
CNN did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
And finally, others, taking “outrageous and unsupported” to a whole new level, have claimed we don’t have any real data at all.
In a January segment on Newsmax, Brett Winterble claimed “We have no objective information available to us about the climate, because the climate is this huge, massive, diverse thing.”
“The weather right now at the equator is warm!” he explained. “The weather down in Australia is summer! The weather up here in the northern hemisphere is winter! So what is the average temperature? I don't know.”
Kate Marvel, a research scientist at Columbia University and NASA, disagrees (as do thousands of pages of scientific research).
“We have observational evidence that temperatures are rising, heat waves are getting worse, atmospheric humidity is increasing, sea levels are rising, rainfall patterns are shifting, sea ice is melting, species migration patterns are changing, and cloud cover is changing, among many other things,” she told The Daily Beast via email.
“Basic physics we've understood since the 1800s tells us that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that warms the planet. If we're wrong about this, we're wrong about most of physics and chemistry.”
Newsmax did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In concluding their memo, the Trump campaign warned that “The American people have been bombarded by [the Mueller] accusations, through the media, for two long years.”
“At this point, there must be introspection from the media who facilitated the reckless statements and a serious evaluation of how such guests are considered and handled in the future,” the memo added.
When it comes to climate change and abortion, that might not be such a bad idea.
