With the announcement today by News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch that the media conglomerate is joining the battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the big question here at DeSmogBlog is whether this means Fox News will end its peddling in global warming junk science.
Steve Milloy (aka. “The Junkman”) is a regular Fox News columnist and tireless campaigner in the war against climate science. A quick read of Milloy’s website and you will find the usual laundry list of long-held global warming denier arguments.
Milloy was at one point the director of an organization called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), which by many is considered the grand-daddy of modern industry front groups. TASCC cut its teeth on the war against tobacco smoke and later expanded into other areas like global warming.
At today’s announcement, Murdoch stated that “Our audience’s carbon footprint is 10,000 times bigger than ours … Imagine if we succeed in inspiring our audiences to reduce their own impacts on climate change by just 1 percent. That would be like turning the state of California off for almost two months.”
I would suggest one of the first big steps would be to ensure quality coverage of science issues like global warming. Offer viewers the real scientific story. That is not to say that other scientific opinions should be somehow censored, but instead there should be effort put into ensuring that these other opinions represent the current scientific thinking on the issue of global warming.
In other words, throw out the “junk science.”
