Rupert Murdoch aware of Climate Change dangers, despit Fox News

Murdoch said, “Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats.”

Murdoch seems as much in the dark about Fox’s Neanderthal stance on the environment as he is about its deep complicity in far-right politics. In a painfully embarrassing public interview with Marvin Kalb last week, Murdoch claimed he had no idea that Fox News has been actively and directly promoting the tea party movement

Fox News Ignores Rupert’s Clean Little Secret, The Nation, by Leslie Savan on 04/16/2010 Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel and the editorial page of his Wall Street Journal may scorn global warming as an anti-capitalist hoax perpetrated by greedy scientists, but when his media empire’s own vast butt is concerned, he’s hedging his bets.

Murdoch’s Dow Jones & Co., which publishes the Journal, released a memo on Monday announcing that it is building “the largest solar power installation at a single commercial site in the U.S.” And guess what: Instead of strangling free enterprise or other such rightwing claptrap, Dow Jones says, “We save the earth’s resources and save money too.”

All the stats of tree-huggy goodness–more than 13,000 solar panels covering nearly 230,000 square feet to generate 4.1 megawatts of electricity from the sun, etc.–are detailed here.

But seeing News Corp., Murdoch’s overall company, earnestly brag about its environmental foresight, you would never know that Fox News is, hands down, the world’s loudest pusher of the lie that “There’s no global warming” (Hannity), that it’s a “global warming scam” Glenn Beck), or, as Fox’s newest hire, Sarah Palin, scoffs, it’s “a bunch of snake oil science.” Over at the Journal, Bret Stephens wrote last week, “global warming is dead… Which means that pretty soon we’re going to need another apocalyptic scare to take its place.”

But a peek behind the denier emissions reveals some countervailing do-gooderism. “Dow Jones will be a leader in renewable energy,” the company memo reads. The solar installation on the South Brunswick, N.J., corporate campus “reduces the need for electricity from non-renewable energy sources.” And it’s not just about big bucks–the staff working on this energy initiative, called Cool Change, “imbued the effort with a justification beyond spreadsheets or blueprints.”……………

in a company-wide address on the subject in 2007, Murdoch said, “Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats.” He pledged to make News Corp. carbon neutral, and even said, in an interview with Grist magazine, that he’d be “subtly introducing [the climate issue] into our content”–heros driving hybrid cars and such. Which is just the sort of green-themed “behavior placement” that a recent Wall Street Journal piece showed is popping up in a slew of NBC TV programs……

Murdoch seems as much in the dark about Fox’s Neanderthal stance on the environment as he is about its deep complicity in far-right politics. In a painfully embarrassing public interview with Marvin Kalb last week, Murdoch claimed he had no idea that Fox News has been actively and directly promoting the tea party movemen

Fox News Ignores Rupert’s Clean Little Secret