The Scientific American editor who said a Fox News producer put the kibosh on his discussion of climate change told TPM on Wednesday he has no plans to make future appearances on the network.
Michael Moyer appeared Wednesday morning on “Fox & Friends” to talk about the tech trends for the future, and wanted to discuss about the impact of climate change. He said he suggested it even though he knew there was little chance the show’s producers would let him run with it.
“About the only interesting thing that the scientific community is sure will happen in the next 50 years is that climate change is going to get worse, and that we’re going to have to deal with the impacts,” Moyer told TPM in an email. “So I put that as one of my talking points. I understood that there was little chance the topic would make it into the show, but I’m not going to self-censor myself from the get-go.”
“The Fox producer came back and very politely and matter-of-factly said that we would have to replace the climate change item,” he added.
Instead of climate change, Moyer discussed finding distant planets with the “Fox & Friends” hosts.
Moyer expressed surprise that his account of an uncomfortable experience behind-the-scenes of the show’s set generated interest, writing that “we all know that Fox doesn’t talk about climate change unless it’s to belittle the science (or scientists).” Cordial as the experience was, Moyer doesn’t expect to be invited back.
“I only tweeted out the experience once I had made the decision not to go on again,” he wrote.
“There are some things that in science and scientific discourse are not controversial at all,” Moyer said in a follow-up phone call. “I hope that we can all as a society agree to at least discuss them and come up with good solutions. Just because you don’t want something to be true doesn’t make it not true.”
Beyond the silence on climate change, Moyer said he found the show’s segments on Benghazi and on whether Secretary of State John Kerry should resign as examples of coverage he thought “seemed to be inventing controversy where none existed.”
“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.”
Moyer also published an account of his experience with Fox News and climate change on his Scientific American blog here.
A video of his appearance was briefly removed from the Fox News website on Wednesday morning but was back by the afternoon.
TPM has reached out to Fox News for comment and received no response.
Watch below, courtesy of Fox News:
This post has been updated.
Image via Fox News
