Jul 11, 2021 Hot Take

Fox Weather: The Last Frontier in Disinformation

Hey Hot Cakes!

Welcome to the weekly newsletter. We mentioned before that we'd be taking some weekends off here and there over the summer, and next weekend is one of them. We'll still be tracking climate coverage via our Twitter account, and we'll be back with more stories the following week. We hope you're all staying safe and well during this really intense time.

Thank you!

Amy + Mary

The Fox Guarding the Henhouse

By Amy Westervelt

Over the past few decades, we've seen every information channel degraded, warped, and weaponized against the American public: Talk radio, then cable news, and more recently social media and podcasts. Through it all, hanging on to objective data above the fray was the weather. And particularly The Weather Channel, which made waves a decade or so ago when it began to clearly and unapologetically connect bizarre weather events with climate change.

Now Fox News is going to go toe to toe with The Weather Channel, launching Fox Weather later this year. The company hasn't made any statements one way or the other about how it will include or ignore climate change, but if its previous coverage of weather on its other channels is any indication, the days of objective weather forecasts are over.

Anyone reading this newsletter probably already knows that Fox News is the country's top media purveyor of climate denial, but it bears repeating. In 2019, Pew found 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.” Pew’s data also “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.”

This new channel is not going to have Laura Ingraham or Tucker Carlson doing the weather report (yet), but even pretty straightforward weather reports have been spun by Fox in the past. They were quick to jump to Trump's defense over Sharpie Gate, when he doctored the forecast for Hurricane Dorian, for example. And the idea that people might be able to consume ideological weather reports is pretty terrifying.

It also has me thinking though—will this be it, the thing that finally makes the powers that be realize we need some sort of media policy, that the only way we’re going to put the disinformation genie back in the bottle even a little bit is probably going to be regulation? Will the impact, the harm, finally be too immediate and too obvious to ignore when a Fox Weather anchor downplays a wildfire or hurricane to the point where people don't evacuate in time? Here's hoping we don't need thousands of (even more) people to die before we finally start addressing the country's rampant information pollution problem.

Climate Change: The Villianless Crime

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

Last week, a subway station in upper Manhattan—one subway stop north of me, in fact—flooded in the torrential rains that preceded the remnants of Hurricane Elsa. Videos from the flood, of people wading through the putrid waters to get where they were going, went viral on social media. (I can only hope they were braving the waters because of a deep personal emergency and not to get to work.) But too many of the viral tweets I saw blamed the wrong people: the mayor, the New York City transit authority, the governor, the city itself…because people love punching up at New York.

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Pipelines Are Not People

By Amy Westervelt

Last week Jessica Reznicek, one of the two women who claimed responsibility for tampering with the Dakota Access pipeline in Iowa, was sentenced to eight years in federal prison, plus fines. Other pipeline protestors and valve turners have faced similarly severe consequences. In this case, the addition of “terrorism” to Reznicek’s charges made the sentence much harsher. Her co-conspirator, Ruby Montoya, is still awaiting her sentencing on the same charges.

It’s as ludicrous as it is terrifying–especially when you consider that a pipeline literally set the ocean on fire LAST WEEK. Over the course of several months, Reznicek and Montoya lit a few machines on fire, and blew out valves across the pipeline. They probably cost Energy Transfer Partners, the owners of the pipeline, about $6 million in damages—a mere rounding error to a multi-billion-dollar company. No one was injured, because the women made sure they never even came close to causing physical harm to a single soul. How the hell is that terrorism, but poisoning the water of thousands of people, exacerbating climate change, leading to the early death of untold millions…that’s just business? Or let's compare apples to apples: How are Montoya and Reznicek being sentenced harshly as terrorists, but the domestic terrorists who attacked the Capitol in military gear, with weapons, on January 6th so far seem to be getting off with fines and minor sentences?

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P.S. Read more about Reznicek and Montoya in this terrific Grist-Rolling Stone collaboration. Watch the movie Woman at War to get inspired about the potential of direct action. Check out Andreas Malm's book How to Blow Up a Pipeline for more on the push to stop fossil fuels at all costs (Wen Stephenson's interview with Malm in the LA Review of Books gives a good overview, too). Follow Giniw Collective for more on how to support the Line 3 Water Protectors.