This summer, the Partnership for Responsible Growth — a bipartisan organization advocating for market-based solutions to climate change — is running a series of ads targeting conservatives. One shows conservatives leaders like George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, and John Boehner (remember them?) talking about the need for climate action.
The ad will air multiple times a day on Fox News in Cleveland and Washington, D.C., during the Republican convention.
What will not run on Fox News, however, is an alternate version of the ad that takes aim at the channel itself. Fox News and other media properties owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch have a long history of misreporting climate science, to put it lightly: One study found that 93 percent of the network’s representations of climate science were misleading or inaccurate.
The Partnership for Responsible Growth isn’t the only group going after Fox News. Friends of the Earth has their own faux ad, too. As a news anchor who looks like she would fit right in behind the Fox News desk reports on a series of extreme weather disasters, water starts to submerge her. “What will it take for Fox News to accept that humans are changing the climate?” the narrator asks as water reaches her chin.
Not this ad, apparently — the network rejected it.
“We want to call out the nefarious role Fox News plays by keeping its audience confused about the climate threat to the country and world,” said Friends of the Earth U.S. President Erich Pica. “Of course Fox News climate distortion is a big part of why Donald Trump and Republican elected officials also deny climate change, to the nation’s physical and economic peril.”
Ignoring climate change may be bad for humanity, but, hey, it sure is good comedy.
