Rupert Murdoch's plans for a Fox Weather streaming service is an "unusually cynical" business decision

The New Republic

Given Murdoch's media empire's long history of propping up energy companies and climate-denying politicians, Fox Weather is "the latest example of Fox’s accelerating radicalization and destructive presence," says Alex Shephard. "Murdoch’s outlets, Fox very much included, regularly entertain climate deniers and constantly question climate science," he says. "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."