After spewing one climate crisis lie after another, Robert Murdoch and Fox News will launch a 24-hour streaming weather channel named Fox Weather.
Fox personalities have downplayed global heating after using typical scare tactics to sway an audience of people trained to accept the most outrageous conspiracy theories this country has seen in a very long time.
But people are rightfully getting nervous, even the far-right viewership at Fox, as the stability of the climate system, has stumbled and is now obvious to all. The chickens, that people in the environmental movement have been screaming about for decades, have come home to roost, and fox news wants to make a buck off it. Because lost viewership appears to have shifted to channels such as The Weather Channel to learn about the drought, heatwaves, and hurricanes that we are seeing across the country and the entire earth, this is news they do not get from the corporate media, and people have begun to change the channel to find the news that is impacting them.
Amid a waning appetite for political news in the post-Trump era, media executives realize that demand for weather updates is ubiquitous — and for an increasing swath of the country, a matter of urgent concern. In the past week alone, temperatures in the Pacific Northwest broke records, wildfires burned in Colorado, and Tropical Storm Elsa strengthened into a hurricane over the Atlantic Ocean.
At CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, average viewership for the first half of 2021 fell 38 percent from a year prior. The audience for the Weather Channel was up 7 percent.
“All the networks are ramping up for this,” said Jay Sures, a co-president of United Talent Agency who oversees its TV division. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that climate change and the environment will be the story of the next decade.” One of his firm’s clients, Ginger Zee, the chief meteorologist at ABC News, now has 2.2 million Twitter followers— more than any ABC News personality besides George Stephanopoulos.
Brian Wieser, the lead analyst at GroupM, the media investing arm of the ad giant WPP, laughed at the notion that weather could be considered apolitical. “You would think — except I’m sitting here in Portland, Ore., in 115 degrees,” he said. “I don’t know that it’s an uncontroversial topic.”
Referring to Fox Weather, he added: “How do you address the fact that weather changes are caused to some degree by humans when you have a media property with a history of challenging that fact?”
Fox Weather will be overseen by Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, and Sharri Berg, a longtime Fox executive who helped launch Fox News at its inception in 1996. Fox declined to make either executive available for interviews. But its spokeswoman said the service would have “a dedicated team of leading meteorologists and experts” that would offer “in-depth reporting surrounding all weather conditions, and we are excited to showcase to viewers what a full-service comprehensive weather platform can deliver beginning this fall.”
Imagine the evil Fox Weather can do.
