Fox News Immediately Begins Smear Campaign Against Al Gore, Nobel Prize

Posted by Faiz Shakir at 3:00 PM on October 12, 2007.

This post, written by Amanda Terkel, orignally appeared on Think Progress

On Fox and Friends this morning, co-host Steve Doocy wasted no time in attacking the announcement that Al Gore has been named a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. "Here's something extraordinary," Doocy sarcastically said. "What do Al Gore, Yasser Arafat, and that crazy Jimmy Carter have in common?" Co-host Gretchen Carlson responded, "They all won the Nobel Peace Prize?"

Fox then displayed a chyron of the last few winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, causing another co-host Brian Kilmeade, to complain: "There's the last five winners -- see Mohamed El Baradei. What do they have in common? I don't know about the 2006 winner, but I will say 2005 and 2007 both anti-Bush."

The Fox panel then turned its attack on An Inconvenient Truth, noting a recent court ruling by a British judge that Gore's film should be accompanied by "guidance notes" when shown in schools. That ruling is now being challenged by schools and teachers. After reporting on the British controversy over Gore's film, Doocy said:

You know, I'm not a scientist. I don't know if any of that stuff is true. I don't think any of it's true. I just know that my daughter watched the movie last week. ... [She said Gore] took three shots at George Bush. And my daughter, who's just 18, was turned off by how it was political. So there you go.

Right-wing bloggers are echoing the same themes in their attack on Gore:

"Look on the bright side: after Arafat, Carter, and Iranian marionette Mohammed ElBaradei, the award couldn't possibly be more degraded." - Hot Air's Allahpundit

"Keeping to the trend of politicized awards, the Nobel Peace Prize has been given jointly to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." - National Review'sJay Richards

"The Nobel Prize committee has basically surrendered to hysterics, mass exaggerators, and liars, most of who are not even climatologists or even any type of scientist." - William Teach at Pirate's Cove

"I wasn't even aware that they had a Nobel Prize for deceptive rhetoric." - Confederate Yankee

"This continues the trend of the Peace Prize being awarded, not for achievements in spreading peace, but to highlight the Committee's political agenda." - James Joyner at Outside The Beltway.

If the right-wing is truly concerned about the "political" nature of the global warming debate, they should blame President Bush for that. He has taken very little action to fight climate change and even refuses to admit that it is manmade. He broke his promise to cap carbon emissions and insists that global warming can be fought through individual "voluntary" programs.

The reason why Gore has won so many accolades is because he is revealing the far right's vast disinformation campaign against global warming science. And he is succeeding.

Tagged as: environment, global warming, fox news, al gore, right wing media, nobel prize

Faiz Shakir is the Research Director at the Center for American Progress and serves as Editor of ThinkProgress.org and The Progress Report.