President Trump’s EPA chief is stepping up his campaign against what he sees as media bias skewed to disparage him and his agency, ripping online media as unreliable and reporters as “lazy.”
The last straw for Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler was a quote attributed to him this week by a Yahoo News reporter and retweeted by the New York Times that he felt far out of context.
“I mean, is Yahoo even a real news service?” he said in an interview with Secrets.
“The media does a disservice to the American public” by reporting on global warming, says EPA head Andrew Wheeler. Wants more positive coverage.https://t.co/YYVs4vqTwi
— Alexander Nazaryan (@alexnazaryan) June 3, 2019
“Anybody online thinks that they’re a reporter these days,” he added.
After he spoke to the National Press Club this week, Yahoo News tweeted out, “‘The media does a disservice to the American public’ by reporting on global warming, says EPA head Andrew Wheeler. Wants more positive coverage.”
Yahoo News misreporting my quote does little to educate the public and takes away from other reporters who covered my remarks from yesterday. https://t.co/dpD0A5M87a pic.twitter.com/HP0UdxWBV1
— EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler (@EPAAWheeler) June 4, 2019
Wheeler said that he did not like how the quote was framed in the tweet. He said that his comment was aimed at nonstop negative coverage that doesn’t tell the story of years of improvement, a point made in the Yahoo News story.
Yahoo News is a popular news service. The president of the White House Correspondents’ Association is the former Yahoo News White House reporter.
Wheeler said it was one of a long string of media efforts meant to mock Trump’s environmental record. He added that there is a pack mentality with anti-Trump media and he cited the retweeting of the Yahoo report by other media.
“It tells me that most reporters are lazy these days,” he said. “What does it say about the state of journalism today? It’s atrocious,” he said.
“I get stuff out of context all the time. All the time, every single day, almost every single article written about me by the mainstream media takes something out of context,” he added.
Wheeler also charged that the media would not have retweeted anything disparaging about a Democrat without checking first.
“If somebody had put out a fake quote about somebody else that made them look bad, a Democrat or one of the Democratic presidential candidates, they would have verified and double verified and called to make sure it was accurate. They probably wouldn’t have even tweeted it if it was negative against somebody that they liked. They would either ignore it of just double check and triple check it,” he told Secrets in his office.
Despite his wariness with the press, Wheeler continues to grant interviews and give speeches and even said, “I probably need to do more but I don’t have enough hours in the day.”
And while media coverage frustrates him, Wheeler pledged, “I’m trying to make sure that it does not slow down our agenda.”
