Some Good News: Fox Weather "News" Streaming-Only, But It's All About Continuing Radicalization
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The Murdoch empire’s coverage of climate change has played no small role in the fracturing of the Murdoch family. James Murdoch, Rupert’s younger son, resigned from News Corp’s board of directors; the split was believed to have been prompted by concerns about coverage of climate change, particularly in Australia, which had recently been devastated by wildfires. “Our board is open to any discussions, but James … he claimed that our papers had covered the bushfires in Australia without discussing climate change,” Rupert Murdoch told his company’s shareholders last fall. “We do not deny climate change, we’re not deniers.”
But Murdoch’s outlets, Fox very much included, regularly entertain climate deniers and constantly question climate science. Recently, Tucker Carlson suggested that climate scientists had an ulterior motive: shrinking your children. (Seriously!) Fox routinely suggests that journalists are overstating the danger of climate change, as it did in a recent segment about climate coverage on CNN. Fox News covers extreme weather events as weather—isolated, extreme examples—rather than as climate; it’s not hard to imagine how that myopic approach could influence its 24-hour weather coverage.
The silver lining is that Fox’s new network is relegated to streaming and will likely struggle to compete with the Weather Channel; Fox’s core demographic—old people—is, moreover, still locked to traditional TV. But the company’s decision to widen the scope of its weather coverage, even just on streaming platforms, could be bad for everyone. Fox News still drives much of the right-wing media ecosystem, and an increased focus on downplaying or denying climate change could broaden the spread of denialist rhetoric and misinformation within the conservative bubble and the Republican Party.
Fox’s decision to double down on weather coverage after years of climate denial is only the latest example of the network’s accelerating radicalism—a shift most apparent in its coverage of Covid-19 and Trump’s false voter-fraud claims. As Preston Padden, a former Murdoch executive, recently wrote in The Daily Beast, “things have gone badly off the tracks” at Fox News. “Fox News has caused many millions of Americans—most of them Republicans (as my wife and I were for 50 years)—to believe things that simply are not true,” Padden wrote.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/162923/fox-news-weather-channel-climate-denial
