The Media Research Center still wasn’t done blaming liberals (and black people) for the California wildfires, and Clay Waters was still at it in a Jan. 14 post:
The taxpayer-funded lefties at National Public Radio felt compelled to defend efforts of “DEI” (i.e. the left-wing “diversity-equity-inclusion” racket) that’s been discredited both intellectually and at the ballot box last November on Friday’s All Things Considered, in “Why right-wing influencers are blaming the California wildfires on diversity efforts,” by reporter Lisa Hagen.
But Waters didn’t bother to actually refute anything in Hagen’s article — all he did is make snarky complaints about labeling. such as “if ‘right-wing media’ is attacking you, left-wing NPR will ride to your defense.” He also added; “NPR was comfortable throwing around the term ‘right-wing,’ but found no labels for the leftist academics they cited to decry the supposed racism inherent in valid questions after a grievously flawed response to a natural disaster.”
Waters went on to huff that right-wing activist Christopher Rufo’s self-admitted deliberate demonization of DEI was called out, though he tried to downplay it: “Even the clip that aired from that so-called right-wing distorter Rufo was anodyne and didn’t make his ideological point.” Wilmouth offered no evidence to counter the claim about Rufo.
Brad Wilmouth spent a Jan. 21 post hyping a side issue:
On Friday’s Erin Burnett OutFront, the show played a report by correspondent Natasha Chen in which she informed viewers of the difficulties caused by electric cars during the Los Angeles wildfires.
It turns out that the batteries used by electric cars have their own environmental consequences when they catch fire, creating hazardous pollution and a blaze that is much more difficult to extinguish than in gas-powered cars.
Things got a little awkward for Wilmouth as he had to acknowledge that his favorite right-wing multibillionaire is a chief manufacturer of said electric cars:
CNN’s willingness to give negative publicity to electric cars which are usually promoted by liberals may have been motivated by the fact that Trump ally Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla, and CNN then got to invoking Musk’s criticism of Democrats over the fires:
Wilmouth wasn’t actually going to come and blame Musk himself for contributing to the problem.
Alex Christy grumbled in a Jan. 23 post about a fact-checker who uses “preferred experts” he didn’t like:
On Tuesday, PolitiFact showed why Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was right to end the company’s partnership with its fact-checking partners. Writer Caleb McCullough gave Donald Trump Jr. a “false” rating because he ran afoul of his preferred experts while ignoring experts who may have given him another perspective.
Christy then found his own “preferred experts” who adhered to the conservatively correct narrative:
McCullough also writes, “The strong Santa Ana winds that worsened the fires in their initial days were stronger than usual for this time of year, but not unprecedented and not attributable to climate change, the report said.”
In other words, it was a hotter summer, but McCullough tried to force a climate change conclusion with a comparison between fall and winter fires started by humans and exacerbated by high winds and summer fires further north caused by lightning strikes. Another perspective would be a group of eight scientists, who nobody could credibly describe as right-wing science deniers, writing in Science Magazine in 2021 that “One hundred percent of SAW fires were human caused, and in the past decade, powerline failures have been the dominant cause.”
Some experts are apparently more valuable than others.
Christy didn’t explain the relevance of making a big deal out of how the fires started, since the Santa Ana winds didn’t discriminate between them. And given that Christy didn’t prove anything the PolitiFact researcher said to be wrong, it’s hardly a reason to justify Zuckerberg’s end to fact-checking.