On Fox News, A Year Of Climate Denial And Conspiracy Theories

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters

In 2019, Fox took climate change denial to insane new levels even as global temperatures reached record heights, natural disasters wreaked havoc, and youth environmental activism led millions of people in protests around the world. Even if you just look at news of the past few weeks, Australia is on fire, the oceans are running out of oxygen, and the Amazon rainforest is at a “tipping point.”

The climate denial narratives on Fox run the gamut from claims that “there’s science on both sides of this issue” to dismissals of the climate crisis as “medieval witchcraft.” Naturally, the hosts and guests also pushed a number of right-wing agenda items like government deregulation and protecting the wealthy. 

Of course, Fox host Tucker Carlson managed to bring discussion of the issue back to his own racist agenda, noting in one segment that “more people were killed last year in the United States by illegal aliens than were killed by climate change.”