Top climate scientists aren’t so hot about the idea of the parent company of Fox News launching a new weather channel.
After all, Fox News’ most popular hosts keep referring to climate change as a “con” and a “fiction.”
“I am extremely skeptical about Fox’s ability to present the climate change issue in the context of weather in a balanced way,” Michael G. Oppenheimer, the director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and Environment at Princeton University, told The Daily Beast.
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With the exception of disruptive major crises like wildfires, hurricanes, and floods, weather coverage on television has long been the province of local news and the well-known, but occasionally sleepy network the Weather Channel.
But in recent months Fox News Media, which operates both Fox News and Fox Business, has begun planning the launch of a new weather-focused news network with the overt aim of taking on the Weather Channel, which plans to launch its own streaming network amid a rise in ratings in the last year.
Now, as historic wildfires and hurricanes rage and temperatures hit all-time highs across the country, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch wants in on the extreme weather coverage action. But many of the nation’s top scientists believe that if Fox Weather follows in the footsteps of its sister channels, it could be a frustrating and dangerous platform that underplays the severe impact of climate change on the daily weather events.
Richard Seager is a climate scientist at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory where he studies climate variability and atmosphere-ocean interaction. In an email, he argued that coverage weather needed to note the role that human-induced climate change was playing in daily weather events. But given Fox’s track record covering climate change, that doesn’t seem like a possibility.
“All media covering the weather has the responsibility to inform its audience about the latest science on human-induced climate change and how it is changing the weather,” he said. “Given the hostility to science and spreading of misinformation, including denial of climate change, common in the Fox News operation, there is every reason to be concerned that a proposed Fox weather channel would do the public a disservice by not providing accurate coverage of the connections between climate change and weather.”
Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist who researched the global carbon cycle and ocean acidification at the Carnegie Institute for years, said that in the past, Fox News had “exhibited a rather brazen approach to truth-telling (or lack thereof),” and he had similar doubts about the company’s dedication to smart, reasonable weather coverage.
“Fox News has been reliable in their pursuit of profit and ideological objectives, but less reliable when it comes to communication of factual information,” he said. “One can only hope that commitment to factual accuracy would trump incentives to sensationalize and make ideological hay out of the weather. While that is my hope, that is not my expectation.”
Dr. Edward Maibach, the director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, said he wasn’t surprised Fox wanted into the weather news space, noting that weather events were somewhat universal experiences, and offered a way to tell the human stories that resonate on television. He said he feared Fox would continue to cast doubt on the legitimacy of climate change, but hoped the Weather channel would take a different path than its bombastic sister news network.
“On one hand, I’m concerned that Fox will use this new platform to further poison the well and mislead the public,” he said. “On the other hand, I choose to be hopeful that they won’t take that path, that they will instead walk the path of fact-based and science-based reporting on weather, and perhaps even on climate change.”
There are plenty of reasons for the nation’s top climate scientists to be skeptical that Fox Weather will be an ideological departure from Fox News.
Tucker Carlson, the top-rated anchor on the network, has repeatedly hosted a physicist who called climate change a “fiction of the media,” while earlier this year, Laura Ingraham’s show mocked President Joe Biden’s warnings about climate change as the “big climate con.” In 2019, Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney mocked links between extreme hurricanes and climate change, and one Fox News guest insisted that there had “always been extreme weather,” and dismissed climate change as “anything to justify taking your money.” And an analysis by left-leaning group Public Citizen in 2018 found that the overwhelming percentage of Fox News climate change-related coverage was dedicated to what the organization called “long-debunked climate myths,” and said the network was “dismissive of the climate crisis, cast warming and its consequences in doubt or employed fearmongering when discussing climate solutions.”
Climate change coverage at Murdoch-owned properties was so concerning that James Murdoch, one of two wealthy scions of Fox Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch, publicly said he stepped down from the company last year in part over his frustration with climate denialism in some of Fox Corp.’s Australian media properties.
“Kathryn and James’ views on climate are well established and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well known,” a spokesperson for the couple told The Daily Beast last year. “They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary.”
In a statement, a Fox Weather spokesperson said the network has hired a “dedicated team of leading meteorologists and experts stationed across the country,” who will provide “in-depth reporting surrounding all weather conditions.” The spokesperson also pointed to this week's New York Times report that claimed there will not be Fox News opinion coverage on the platform.
Fox’s entry into the streaming weather space also comes at a time when other competitors on cable news are increasingly dedicating resources to covering climate change.
CNN recently announced that it was adding a team specifically devoted to covering climate change and its impacts on Americans’ daily lives. And the Weather Channel itself is altering its coverage to emphasize the impact of climate change on daily weather events. Last month, the Weather Channel said it would air a documentary series about the impact of climate change on gold prospectors. The channel also said it plans to discuss sustainability more on its morning news program, and would increasingly cover the impact of climate change on the economy.
“We weren’t singing it from the rafters because American sentiment hadn’t caught up, “ (Nora Zimmett, the outlet’s chief content officer,) told Variety. “We have got to talk about it.”
Some scientists worried that even if Fox Weather was not explicitly political, avoiding mentioning climate change or acknowledging its existence only in passing would also result in incomplete and negligent news coverage. Oppenheim noted in a telephone call that all current weather is influenced by climate change, and covering the weather on a daily basis without discussing the impact of climate change would be a disaster.
“It is frequently very relevant, and if they are going to lobotomize it, that's as bad as lying about it.”
