Cleaning up after elephants
Over the past week over 13 million people were exposed to climate misinformation.
In this space each week, triplecheck will share information on the climate misinformation we’re seeing online – what’s going viral, how many people are seeing it, and who’s responsible for moving it. triplecheck was initiated by the Climate Action Campaign and was created to develop innovative tools to help fight misinformation.
Over the past week (6/7 to 6/14) over 13 million people were exposed to climate misinformation. The vast majority of the content focused on Biden’s recent statement that the impacts of climate change pose a significant threat to national security. Biden’s remarks spurred a response from former President Trump, who released a statement saying that Biden should fire the Joint Chiefs of Staff if “they actually said....Climate Change is our greatest threat.” Right wing pundits, such as Laura Ingraham, Bryan Dean Wright, and Donald Trump Jr. went on the attack, as did Republican members of Congress, including Senator Ted Cruz and Congressman Dan Crenshaw. Newsmax then released a Rassmussen Reports poll that found that “most Americans are not on the same page as President Joe Biden in believing climate change is the ‘greatest’ security threat to the nation.”
In the course of the coverage, The Hill noted that former President Trump “took Biden’s comments out of context…[Biden] was referring to a warning the Joint Chiefs gave him at the start of his tenure as Vice President” -- a point that even the New York Post picked up. And in a hearing on June 10 in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley said that he has no difference of opinion with President Biden on the national security implications of climate change.
Sean Hannity picked up an Accuweather report stating that the United States had seen the lowest number of severe tornados in May since 1950, which had 2 million human views on Twitter and was shared more than 1,200 times on Facebook. What he didn’t mention was a recent Accuweather report warning that the tornado season was “just getting started” and that the 180 tornados the United States saw in March “easily eclipsed the three-year monthly average of 82 tornados.”
Fact checking these guys is like cleaning up after an elephant -- and the messenger is often as important as the message. People do get a lot of their news online -- but the most recent research from Gallup and the Knight Foundation found that “Americans are more likely to trust local news than national news and to perceive less bias in local reporting than what they see nationally.” This just underscores the importance of strong relationships with local television and print outlets -- getting a local story that you can then amplify online for a wider audience might be more effective than getting a piece in a big national outlet.
We’ll see you next week!