Fox News Channel's top Washington editor ordered the network's reporters to couple any mention of global climate change with skepticism about the data underlying such a scientific conclusion, according to an e-mail released by a liberal media-watchdog group Wednesday.
Media Matters for America said the internal e-mail from Bill Sammon, Fox News's Washington bureau chief, called into question the network's impartiality in reporting on climate change.
In an e-mail sent last December to Fox News's journalists in the wake of a global conference on climate change, Sammon asked Fox journalists to "refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies."
Media Matters, a group that tracks alleged conservative favoritism in the news media, said it obtained the e-mail from a Fox News employee, whom it did not identify.
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