Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Washington Post:

A stunning cache of internal correspondence and deposition testimony obtained by the software company and made public on Thursday in a Delaware court filing showed high-level Fox executives and on-air stars privately agonizing over the wild and false claims of a stolen election that Trump allies promoted on Fox airwaves in the weeks after the 2020 election. “Sidney Powell is lying,” prime-time star Tucker Carlson wrote to his producer about a Trump lawyer who had appeared on Fox and spewed baseless accusations. “There is NO evidence of fraud,” anchor Bret Baier wrote to one of his bosses.
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But the Dominion filing also lends ammunition to their long-held argument: that Fox allowed the false claims to air because it was fearful of losing viewers to Newsmax, an ever more pro-Trump news channel.

“The texts and emails support [Dominion’s] claim that Fox was more concerned about its audience and market share than the truth concerning the 2020 presidential election,” said Timothy Zick, a professor at William & Mary Law School who specializes in the First Amendment and called the breadth of the internal communications “extraordinary.”

In a statement, a Fox spokesperson said: “There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.”

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I was asking myself during the day yesterday whether the stunning hypocrisy revealed in court disclosures would cause even a ripple in the larger discussion, simply because the “mainstream” media is vested in the idea that Fox News is a “real” news organization, with “real” journalists, who should be taken seriously, instead of the fraudulent propaganda outfit that it is.

And if that long overdue reassessment takes place, would it even scratch the surface of the alternative universe of non-fact that a significant segment of the population, the Fox News audience, have been sequestered in for 3 decades?

Still TBD, but the best discussion I’ve seen of the revelations is in the “Pod Save America” segment above.

Below, some recent examples of Fox’s takes on climate news. I hadn’t reviewed in a while, and it’s actually worse, and crazier, than I thought.
Below, “climate scientist” Tom Harris gives a full blown, not even nuanced climate denial screed that sounds straight out of a 2010 era climate denial conference. Even uses a lump of coal as a prop.

In the next one, Tucker Carlson reaches for a two-fer, with both climate denial and anti-vax messaging.

Below, “The Five” have a “fair and balanced” discussion with purported “liberal” member weakly supporting more discussion about climate as an issue.

UPDATE: Discussion on Bill Maher show last night