A climate change activist and a former Fox News reporter are teaming up on a website designed to combat “disinformation” spread by right-leaning media, focusing especially on climate change.
The author and blogger Joe Romm and ex-Fox News politics reporter Carl Cameron launched FrontPageLive.com last week, a news aggregation website that the duo call “the go-to liberal antidote” to the conservative aggregation site, the Drudge Report.
Romm and Cameron’s project does not specifically focus on climate change. But the issue dominates the website, with a special section marked by the hashtag #ClimateCrisis dedicated to links to stories focused on it.
“Climate change is the clearest instance where President Trump and the right-wing disinformation machine promote the opposite of science,” said Romm, a physicist trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who served in the Clinton administration’s Energy Department. “History will judge it more harshly than anything else.”
The Washington Examiner recently conducted a joint interview with Romm, known for his climate change blogging at ThinkProgress, and Cameron, who covered politics for Fox News over two decades before quitting after the 2016 presidential campaign.
Romm is the brainchild behind FrontPageLive and its editor-in-chief, but Cameron identifies with its mission to communicate what they hold to be accurate information about climate change.
Cameron was a news reporter who rarely covered climate change because “it wasn’t a high-priority issue” for Fox News. But he grew frustrated with the opinion side of Fox that he said is filled with “climate deniers” seeking to question consensus on the issue. Cameron worries that impulse, shared by the Drudge Report, has become worse under Trump, a devoted consumer of conservative media who is a climate change skeptic.
“The problem of misinformation and arguing that climate science is somehow partisan is really dangerous,” Cameron said. “Trump is one of the greatest purveyors of it we have seen since the advent of the media.”
Cameron, a self-described “data junkie” intrigued by presidential polling, is also a defender of journalism and says he wants to stop misinformation about climate change science.
“What has been denied for so long is self-evident right now,” Cameron said, pointing to worsening extreme weather events.
Matt Drudge, the creator and editor of the Drudge Report, has a history of seeking to undermine climate change.
Drudge was criticized for suggesting the government may have lied about the danger of Hurricane Matthew in October 2016 to increase the public’s concern about climate change.
“The deplorables are starting to wonder if govt has been lying to them about Hurricane Matthew intensity to make exaggerated point on climate,” Drudge wrote in a Twitter post, in advance of the storm hitting Florida.
The Drudge Report treats climate change in a mocking and skeptical fashion. Most of its links have headlines with the phrase “climate change” written in quotation marks.
“NYC to Slash Red Meat Consumption to Fight ‘Climate Change,’” an April 25 headline reads.
“Young people blame ‘climate change’ for their small savings!” blares a May 23 headline.
But the Drudge Report also posts factual links about weather events and has recently shared stories highlighting a shift among Republicans in Congress who acknowledge climate change as a problem.
Drudge’s top headline on the afternoon of June 28 said: “FRANCE HOTTEST DAY IN HISTORY!” which linked to a news story by The Weather Channel that includes a quote from a meteorologist saying, “We should expect more intense and frequent heat waves with climate change.”
Romm and Cameron acknowledge their site has an agenda.
“This is the world I come from,” Romm said of his career focused on climate change. “Nobody is 100% accurate.”
FrontPageLive, like Drudge, predominantly posts links to news stories from other sites, and its headlines seem more modest.
There was a June 28 link to a similar news story to Drudge’s about hot weather in Europe with the headline, “France hits 113 degrees, hottest temperature in the country’s history.”
But FrontPageLive also links to op-eds written by Romm with headlines such as, “Time to face the crisis: Climate change got just 15 minutes in two debates.” It features short newscast videos hosted by Cameron covering popular topics such as climate change and the Democratic primary debates.
The site also encourages the public to donate money to fighting climate change, with a banner that directs readers to a Sierra Club campaign to shut coal plants.
Romm and Cameron, however, draw a distinction between FrontPageLive and Drudge, suggesting Drudge is not trying to be accurate on climate change.
“The central question is this: Is the person who is speaking or writing making a good faith effort to accurately describe climate change and the solutions that meet the challenge?” Romm said.
The duo, however, recognize the challenge of competing with Drudge. Romm would not reveal the budget for FrontPageLive. It has no outside capital behind it and includes six part-time employees. Romm said he has provided most of the funding himself.
“We are David against Goliath,” Romm said. “It is clearly easier to create and viralize fake news than true news.”
