In typical Fox "News" fashion, the outlet played stupid when reacting to other news outlets' coverage of Florida's Hurricane Ian, flummoxed as to why CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC used the term "climate change" when reporting on the disaster.
The recent Fox report went so far as to count the number of times "climate change" was mentioned in Ian coverage, shocked that the term came up 311 times in a seven-day period for CNN, 212 times for MSNBC, and less than 100 times for ABC, CBS, and NBC.
"The vast majority of these instances saw hosts, reporters and guests state that climate change was causing oceans to warm, and thus were exacerbating and intensifying major natural disasters, including forest fires and storms such as hurricanes," the mystified Fox reporter said, becoming more addled when MSNBC threw in the term "human-caused."
"In a separate segment, 'Morning Joe' co-host Mika Brzezinski took it a step further and claimed that Hurricane Ian was the result of "human-caused" climate change." Uh, yeah, and …?
The reporter's complete (feigned) ignorance as to why the words "climate change" — which 97% of actively publishing scientists agree is happening and that it's human-caused, according to NASA — would be mentioned in news coverage of weather-related disasters might have made sense in the year 2000 (although scientists have been talking about human-caused global warming for more than 100 years).
But when reporting on weather-related disasters today, not mentioning climate change — which a growing number of Republicans are beginning to take seriously — would be like omitting the words "wind" and "storm" when covering a hurricane. And attacking those who do include climate change as part of the conversation is idiocracy at its finest. This is 2022 — deal with it.
