Catherine Thompson describes Fox News censorship of a Scientific American guest on Talking Points Memo.
The Scientific American editor who said a Fox News producer put the kibosh on his discussion of climate change told TPM on Wednesday he has no plans to make future appearances on the network. Michael Moyer appeared Wednesday morning on “Fox & Friends” to talk about the tech trends for the future, and wanted to discuss the impact of climate change. He said he suggested it even though he knew there was little chance the show’s producers would let him run with it.
“About the only interesting thing that the scientific community is sure will happen in the next 50 years is that climate change is going to get worse, and that we’re going to have to deal with the impacts,” Moyer told TPM in an email. “So I put that as one of my talking points. I understood that there was little chance the topic would make it into the show, but I’m not going to self-censor myself from the get-go.”
“The Fox producer came back and very politely and matter-of-factly said that we would have to replace the climate change item,” he added.
“There are some things that in science and scientific discourse are not controversial at all,” Moyer said in a follow-up phone call. “I hope that we can all as a society agree to at least discuss them and come up with good solutions. Just because you don’t want something to be true doesn’t make it not true.”
Beyond the silence on climate change, Moyer said he found the show’s segments on Benghazi and on whether Secretary of State John Kerry should resign as examples of coverage he thought “seemed to be inventing controversy where none existed.”
“I found the tone and topics of coverage while I was sitting in the green room this morning to be not something that I wanted to be a part of in the future,” he said. “I didn’t realize that the drumbeat of conservative propaganda was so ubiquitous on the show.”
Cross-posted from The Sensible Center
http://thesensiblecentercom.blogspot.com/2014/05/fox-news-vs-science.html