What type of “news” station would repeat a false charge that ideological elements have leveled in order to maximize public science skepticism over the issue of climate change, and repeat it not as an example of the type of misleading hype that is misinforming the public, but repeat it as a fact themselves?

This type of “news” station.  Or this:

And that is exactly what this station did when it came to the issue of basic climate change science.

Let’s see how they did it:

The wildly anti environmental and Orwellian named “Competitive Enterprise Institute” (CEI) does everything possible not to level the competitive playing field, but instead give those companies and methodological processes that pollute and degrade the environment an inherent advantage over those that don’t, by working to completely dismiss the cost or relevancy of this external damage in our marketplace.

CEI is wildly ideological, puts fealty to corporations before individual freedom, and seems to confuse capitalism with unfettered oligopoly and even total resource (and market) anarchy.  It even thinks that the market itself properly solves, and protects against, company harms directly to an individual. In other words, if a company knowingly puts a highly carcinogenic substance in a common product, and 15 years later thousands die of cancer, in the CEI’s seemingly naive and ideologically zealous view, the achievement of remuneration from the company (assuming it still exists, and has not re-formed) will have corrected the wrong and somehow serve as a disincentive against such behavior.  (Yet at the same time that the CEI apparently wants to limit potential remunerations in the first place, through caps and the like.)

In other words, when it comes to abstract future damages, these will somehow compensate for a quarterly, now is what matters, profit system, when any corporate entity could have dissolved and regrouped twenty times over before even the knowledge necessary to attach liability would materialize; and let alone the fact that money after the fact is not a substitute for the avoidance of unnecessary and easily preventable harm or damage in the first place.

So the CEI seems like a good source for “fair and balanced” Fox to cite without checking a single fact, right? And this is what Fox routinely does. So when the CEI, among other places, gleefully reported how “climate gate” revealed that scientists “destroyed 150 years worth of climate data”  Fox (along with a few other less than stellar media sources, such as the similarly Rupert Murdoch owned New York Post) went ahead and parroted this falsity as fact, greatly misleading and deceiving its viewers in the process.

Blatant, erroneous propaganda housed as “‘Fair and Balanced’ news” follows a pattern by Fox on the climate change issue, as with many other issues. (Here’s an example, illustrated be a resident Fellow from the otherwise often industry supporting CATO Institute, where Fox simply doesn’t know the basic facts on the critical issue of fundamental American Liberties.)

The station has even even gone so far as to have its correspondents lie about the issue of climate change on other occasions as well — or, once again, just ignorantly recite ideological propaganda talking points like an uninformed person at the dinner table might, as opposed to, say, the “most trusted” name in news. Such as when correspondent Andrew Napolitano wildly told Fox viewers that a NASA study claimed that man was not responsible for climate change — when the study in fact said absolutely nothing of the sort.

In fact, here is what NASA says on the subject.

Several lines of evidence show that current global warming cannot be explained by changes in energy from the sun.

The report that Napolitano falsely cited, simply noted that solar irradiation (obviously), along with other things, may play a role in the earth’s atmospheric temperatures. It said nothing about man’s effect, and said nothing to undermine the general consensus on the issue, including that of NASA. Namely, that man’s activities are invariably starting to effect climate, and will likely do so increasingly. This is a consensus arrived at because greenhouse gases trap heat; heat ultimately warms oceans, which drives climate; greenhouse gases, through specific and easily identifiable anthropomorphic activities, are rising at at an alarming rate;  atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are as a result now well higher than at any time in the past three quarter of a million years; and slowly but surely, the earth is warming, as weather additionally becomes increasingly variable.

In other words, Fox’s “Fair and Balanced” means that Fox tells you what they want — even if it blatantly misleads viewers on the most basic of facts necessary to correctly understand an issue — while working hard to pretend that it is fair and balanced so that viewers really think they are being led to independent conclusions based upon an objective look at the news. When they are being repeatedly mislead, yet made to think otherwise.