Fox News found an ingenious way to attack the Obama administration for the horrendous mine spill contaminating rivers in Colorado and New Mexico without sounding like anyone cared too much about pollution.
On Fox’s Your World, host Neil Cavuto began his “coverage” by demonizing President Obama. We saw a 2010 clip of Obama saying about the BP oil spill, “When I woke up this morning and I’m shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, 'Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?' …When we are fouling the earth like this it has concrete implications not just for this generation but for future generations.”
Cavuto followed with a cheap shot: “Alright, we have got no indications whether Malia has updated [President Obama] to look at what’s going on at the Animas River right now in the New Mexico Colorado area that is spilled, with all of this yellow-covered filth across miles. Millions of gallons worth and this was the fault of the EPA. So why doesn’t this ratchet the same attention that the BP oil spill did or before that, the EXXON Valdez oil spill? Are these different because in this case it’s the Environmental Protection Agency that’s to blame?”
Actually there has been plenty of media coverage. Did Cavuto or his staff not do any research?
For example:
CNN: Health impact of Animas River toxic spill: ‘This is a real mess’
ABC World News: State of Emergency in Colorado Over Toxic River Heading Toward the Grand Canyon
CBS This Morning: Toxic Colorado mine spill “catastrophic,” mayor says
NBC Nightly News: Toxic Sludge in Colorado River Threatens Drinking Water Supply
The guest for this segment was one of Fox’s favorite climate-change deniers, fossil-fuels lackey, Chris Horner.
“Chris what do you make of a clear double standard here?” Cavuto asked.
Horner immediately tried to use the spill to attack Obama’s carbon-reduction plans: “The lack of outrage just shows there’s a widespread acceptance at least among the media that the EPA is different than you and I. Or government is. They don’t operate with accountability. Obviously, they have different long term incentives but they don’t have the accountability that you and I do.” He called it “perfect timing” as the EPA moves to re-design our electrical systems. “Something for which they are completely unfit,” Horner sneered.
Cavuto complained, “The immediate reaction after the BP spill is no one even waited to find out what happened. It was already the evil upon evils and it was an environmental disaster …just as the Valdez thing was an environmental disaster, no knocking it. Why should we pick and choose our environmental disasters? A disaster is a disaster is a disaster.”
It was telling that Fox never found one person who wasn't outraged or didn’t blame the EPA.
Horner took a swipe at those concerned with global warming. “They can tell you the weather 300 years out… but they can’t tell you the impact when they punch a hole in a retaining wall.”
Other Fox News hosts just happened to pick up on this in the same way. Stuart Varney tweeted, “The @EPA says it’s sorry for the massive spill... How come there’s no outrage from the president?”
At the end of an August 12 discussion about Donald Trump on Outnumbered, the gang used the EPA spill to favorably compare Donald Trump to President Obama:
HARRIS FAULKNER: He’s [Trump] tapped into something so bold and so big with the American people right now. When he goes off about, “You guys want to talk about my tone, how can you not be angry about…” and then he enumerates.”
SANDRA SMITH: “Isn’t that what everybody’s wanted from the current President? Emotion! Show us that you’re going after ISIS!
ELIZABETH MCDONALD: Now we have a President who won’t even show up at that awful toxic spill and going through the river in the west.
FAULKNER: That’s because the federal government did that.
MCDONALD: Yeah, even though he showed up at the BP oil spill in the gulf.
Watch the faux outrage below, from the August 11 Your World and August 12 Outnumbered.
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