A former Fox News political correspondent is teaming up with a progressive climate change activist to start an online publication aimed at promoting left-wing causes, especially climate change.
Carl Cameron, who quit his job as a Fox News political reporter following the 2016 presidential election, joined forces with liberal blogger Joe Romm to launch FrontPageLive.com, a news aggregator that the duo called “the go-to liberal antidote” to the conservative Drudge Report.
Dynamic duo
While the website, which launched last week, doesn’t exclusively focus on climate change, it features a “#ClimateCrisis” section devoted purely to alarmist articles covering the highly politicized subject. Romm, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained physicist who worked in the Department of Energy under President Bill Clinton, explained the publication’s fixation with global warming.
“Climate change is the clearest instance where President Trump and the right-wing disinformation machine promote the opposite of science,” Romm said. “History will judge it more harshly than anything else.”
Romm is known for blogging about climate change issues at the progressive website ThinkProgress. Cameron, meanwhile, spent over two decades reporting for Fox News, although he told the Washington Examiner during a joint interview that he rarely had the opportunity to talk about climate change at the conservative network.
Cameron said he was frustrated with the opinion programming at Fox News, which he said was run by “climate deniers” who questioned the popular consensus on the issue. He sees the Drudge Report, which is repeatedly ranked as the top source for online conservative news, as a platform for “disinformation” produced by climate skeptics.
“The problem of misinformation and arguing that climate science is somehow partisan is really dangerous,” Cameron told the Examiner. “Trump is one of the greatest purveyors of it we have seen since the advent of the media.”
Skeptics versus alarmists
Cameron considers himself a “data junkie” obsessed with presidential polling and believes that he has a mission to set the record straight regarding climate science. He subscribes to the liberal theory that catastrophic weather events are worsening due to man-made global warming.
“What has been denied for so long is self-evident right now,” Cameron said, referring to extreme weather events like droughts and hurricanes.
Conversely, the conservative-minded Drudge Report has historically been skeptical of mainstream climate change opinions. Headlines often include discrediting quotations around the term “climate change,” and articles on the platform are often highly skeptical of the phenomenon.
“NYC to Slash Red Meat Consumption to Fight ‘Climate Change,’” one April 25 headline reads. “Young people blame ‘climate change’ for their small savings!” states another article from May 23.
However, many conservative publications, including the Drudge Report, aren’t entirely dismissive of climate change. They challenge the scientific consensus, which is often politicized by leftist climate alarmists with an agenda, while remaining open to rational debate concerning the subject. As an aggregate, the Drudge Report links to stories from networks like The Weather Channel, including a June 28 story titled: “FRANCE HOTTEST DAY IN HISTORY.”
Progressive experiment
While Cameron and Romm hope to emulate the success of the Drudge Report, progressive media projects often fail in their attempts to duplicate conservative successes. For instance, 90 percent of talk radio is dominated by conservative commentators. Liberal experiments such as Air America have failed to gain any traction in the same marketplaces.
Liberals commentators like Mario Cuomo and Jim Hightower failed to capture a slice of the talk radio success experienced by right-wingers like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and conservative pundits continue to dominate radio airwaves, even in progressive markets like New York and San Francisco.
One reason, of course, is that there is little need for a liberal alternative to mainstream media sources like The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, NBC, and more.
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