Allison Fisher

TV news barely covered Trump's Big Oil "quid pro quo" last year. Now that it's come to fruition, networks should give the scandal the attention it deserves.

Fox News figures for years claimed the Inflation Reduction Act would increase energy costs. In reality, the IRA spurred major clean energy innovation and reduced energy costs for millions of families. And studies now say that repealing the act and its clean energy tax credits — as the Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” would do — would increase household energy costs.

On June 2, acting Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator David Richardson made headlines, first reported by Reuters, for telling staff in a daily briefing that he had been unaware the U.S. has a hurricane season. While reporting included a response from the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA's parent agency, claiming his comment was a joke, it raised questions about the agency’s disaster response plans and came “amid widespread concern that the departures of a raft of top FEMA officials, staff cuts and reductions in hurricane preparations will leave the agency ill-prepared for a storm season forecast to be above normal.”Legacy news outlets including cable networks CNN and MSNBC covered Richardson’s controversial remarks and the wider concerns about the agency’s preparedness on June 3 while Fox News seemingly ignored them.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has used his many appearances on Fox News and Fox Business to become one of the most visible members of the Trump administration so far. A Media Matters analysis found that Zeldin made at least 36 appearances on cable news during his first 100 days as EPA administrator, with 35 of those occurring on Fox networks — the most of any Trump Cabinet official.Appearing on networks that are friendly to Trump’s agenda has allowed Zeldin to push climate-related misinformation and shape the discourse around environmental issues as he  emerges “as one of the most devoted public champions” of Trump’s quest to “demolish the Biden agenda.”Staples of Zeldin’s Fox appearances have included promoting rollbacks of environmental safeguards, hyping cuts and the elimination of programs at the EPA, and pushing the campaign to claw back congressionally allocated climate funds. He has also appeared on Fox to defend Trump’s orders to boost coal and muddy th

While the fight over the Inflation Reduction Act in Congress is “happening behind the closed doors” of the House Ways and Means Committee, local media outlets have been reporting on both the economic benefits of the legislation’s clean energy provisions and, inversely, the potential economic threats of repealing it. Passed in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act has “spurred the highest levels of factory construction in American history, with more than 400,000 new jobs announced across the country.” But despite its success, especially in red states, it has long been a target of the GOP and President Donald Trump, who has referred to it as the “Green New Scam.”  The administration is already hobbling projects and killing jobs created by the IRA through executive orders and other agency actions, but Congress will decide whether to revoke the policy’s clean energy incentives altogether. Notably, as Politico reported:“A growing number of House Republicans are urging the party to preserve the

Every year, billions of gallons of sewage and toxic industrial waste flow down the Tijuana River, across the U.S.-Mexico border, and into the Pacific Ocean. It is a complex, decades-old, transjurisdictional issue that environmentalists and governments at the local, state, and federal level have been grappling with for years. Recently, entities on both sides of the border have made some progress, but experts agree that more has to be done to address the international pollution crisis.But viewers watching Fox News would have scant understanding of the complexity of this issue, the shared responsibility for its resolution, or the progress that has been made in both the U.S. and Mexico. According to Fox and new EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, the issue is simple: Mexico is to blame.  Since mid-March, Fox has aired roughly a dozen segments discussing the pollution of the Tijuana River, often folding the story into its immigration coverage. Fox’s coverage has presented the issue primarily as a failure of Mexico t

In 2024, corporate broadcast TV news mentioned climate solutions in 23% of climate segments, or 75 out of 324 — slightly more than in 2023 but well below the peak of 35% in 2022. The best coverage of climate change centers on solutions at scale with what is needed to reduce carbon emissions, and it carefully vets potential solutions pushed by corporations and fossil fuel interests which often do little to tackle the root cause of global warming. These discussions of climate solutions are frequently presented alongside discussions of current climate impacts, including extreme weather events, that make up the bulk of climate reporting on broadcast news. Ahead of this year’s annual Earth Day celebration on April 22, this study looks at how broadcast news covered climate solutions in 2024, which corporate TV networks led the way in their coverage, and what those networks can do to spotlight the Trump administration’s current torrent of rollbacks and attacks on climate action and clean energy solutions in

Fox Business’ The Big Money Show aired a segment purportedly on achieving American energy dominance in which the hosts used false narratives and missing context to cheerlead the president's actions on energy. Airing on April 7, the segment came several days after oil prices plunged to the lowest level since the pandemic due to market fears of a global recession – and hours before Trump signed his executive orders aimed at boosting coal production. Here are five things Fox Business got wrong (or omitted) about energy:

On Fox Business, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin repeats climate fund fraud claims one day after a federal judge said the agency has failed to offer “evidence with regard to malfeasance”

National and local meteorologists — who are among the most trusted media personalities — are taking to social media to warn about the risks to public safety as President Donald Trump begins gutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which operates the National Hurricane Center, two tsunami warning centers, the National Weather Service, and more. The warnings were prompted by February 27 reports that “the Commerce Department has laid off hundreds of NOAA employees, many with specialized skills who work at one of the world's top climate science and weather forecasting agencies.” Dismantling NOAA is part of the blueprint for the second Trump administration laid out by Project 2025, a comprehensive transition plan assembled by The Heritage Foundation and over 100 conservative partner organizations. Project 2025’s call to dismantle NOAA by eliminating or privatizing key functions of the agency is also the endgame of years of attempts by conservatives and right-wing media to attack the