At Fox News, Planet Earth Is Sponsored By ExxonMobil

[NNN0LHI]

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201108110025

August 11, 2011 5:56 pm ET by Shauna Theel

We noted in June that Fox News' iPad app was sponsored exclusively by ExxonMobil, a corporation known for paying think tanks to obfuscate the scientific consensus on climate change. Now FoxNews.com's "Planet Earth" section is also brought to you by the oil giant:

In fact, FoxNews.com's entire Science & Technology section and their opinion page appear to be sponsored by ExxonMobil; the other sections of their website are not.

Earlier this year, FoxNews.com sought to debunk the fact that Earth has warmed over the past 30 years, as well as the notion that human activity has contributed to the warming with a "Planet Earth" article, portions of which "are utter nonsense" and "do not make sense" according to climatologists consulted by Media Matters.

Two recent stories that Fox News' Planet Earth section ran on climate change were based around claims pushed by the Heartland Institute's James Taylor and quoted Taylor's views. A post by Taylor, which baselessly claimed a research group "doctors sea level data" to exaggerate climate change, inspired a FoxNews.com article asking, "Is climate change raising sea levels, as Al Gore has argued -- or are climate scientists doctoring the data?"

[Sal Minella]

1. Rupert Murdoch has now recognized the reality of anthropogenic

climate change, but Roger Ailes (head of Fox "News") remains stalwart in his belief that there ain't no sucha thang.

As Murdoch said of Ailes, "He really believes that stuff."

(from a story in AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story/151980/how_the_head_of_fox_news_is_making_americans_more_right-wing%2C_more_ignorant_and_ever_more_terrified?page=entire

Edited to add link