Steven Milloy is a right-wing hack who makes a good living abusing science. He has a column on the FOXNews site, but also runs two groups out of his home that have received over $90,000 from ExxonMobil. He’s upset because two well-known leftwing activists, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Laurie David, have convinced his boss at FOXNews that global warming is one of the biggest stories in the world today. It turns out that John F. Kennedy Jr. likes Roger Aisles, who runs FOXNews, if not his politics, and convinced him to see a Power Point presentation put on by Al Gore on global warming. According to the story in the LATimes:
Ailes attended, and also agreed to meet several weeks later with Kennedy and David.
"I made the point to him that this should not be a political issue and that the Republican Party has a strong conservation tradition," Kennedy said.
The pitch worked. Ailes agreed the subject merited coverage, according to the activists.
This has Steven Milloy hot under the collar. He posted a piece by another right-wing hack, Patrick Murphy of the Cato Institute (also funded in part by ExxonMobil) to contest the Fox documentary that ran this past Sunday. "FOX Caves to the Global Warming Crowd!" warned an alarmed Patrick, but his was a weak effort preoccupied with obscure claims and utterly failed to challenge the well-established scientific consensus that yes, global warming is real, and it’s happening in the Arctic first, as scientists have long predicted. FOX reporter Rick Folbaum reported from Alaska that:
After months of research and interviews with many experts, I’ve learned this simple fact: the earth is heating up. And it’s happening much faster than ever before. No one can argue with this. The vast majority of the scientific community says we’re witnessing a unique and troubling kind of climate change, one where changes that used to occur over centuries are now taking place during the course of a single lifetime.
Worse yet for Milloy, FOXNews is continuing to post the latest news on global warming, including a study published today by scientists at Princeton, warning that global warming threatens to innundate the Jersey shore with the equivalent of 100-year floods…every five years.
Yesterday FOX ran two stories on global warming. The first focused on a glacier in Greenland that is shrinking much faster than scientists expected. On his site, Milloy showed concern. "Worse, they’re running this!" cried a frightened Milloy, speaking of a study published by scientists at the University of Delaware predicting that tens of thousands of Americans could die in global warming-caused heat waves, just as over 20,000 Europeans did in 2003.
Maybe these kind of facts changed Roger Aisles’ mind, but I wonder if he was also thinking of the future of the media company he runs. FOXNews is tightly tied in the public perception to a President and a political party whose approval ratings are plummeting. Mightn’t covering global warming be a conveniently non-political way for FOX to show its independence of the failing Bush administration?
Kit Stolz 