Fox News denied on Wednesday that a producer had “specifically” told an editor for Scientific American magazine that he should avoid discussing climate change in a “Fox & Friends” segment that aired earlier in the day about future tech trends.
After appearing on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday morning, Michael Moyer tweeted that he had wanted to talk about the impacts of climate change as a future trend but was “told to pick something else” by a producer at the show. He later wrote a fuller account of his experience for his Scientific American blog.
Moyer also told TPM he chose to share his experience after deciding that he wouldn’t appear on the show again.
“I found the tone and topics of coverage while I was sitting in the green room this morning to be not something that I wanted to be a part of in the future,” he said. “I didn’t realize that the drumbeat of conservative propaganda was so ubiquitous on the show.”
A Fox spokesperson sent TPM a statement on Wednesday afternoon denying that climate change was ever an issue.
“We invited Michael on for a segment on technological and scientific trends we can expect in the future. We worked closely with him and his team and there was never an issue on the topic of climate change,” Suzanne Scott, senior vice president of programming at Fox News, said in the statement. “To say he was told specifically not to discuss it, would be false.”
In response to Fox’s side of the story, Moyer told TPM the producer had explicitly mentioned climate change.
“The exact quote from the Fox producer, in an email, was ‘can we replace the climate change with something else?'” Moyer wrote in an email.
