Fox’s New Channel Changes the Climate for Weather TV

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Sean Hannity won’t (yet) make a guess. But Fox Weather, which will be funded by advertisers, will be operating in Houston, Seattle, St. It is aggressively hunting star meteorologists from St. Louis and other markets. He’s also chasing big talent on The Weather Channel, where several Hollywood agents tell their crazy bidding wars. A top Weather Channel meteorologist – Shane Brown, whose title is “senior weather products architect” – defected to Fox last month, despite efforts to retain him.

The view at Mr. Murdoch’s company is that the sometimes solemn world of weather TV is poised to be disrupted. Fox is recruiting multiple meteorologists and weather data analysts for the venture, which includes an ostentatious multi-million-dollar studio in its Midtown Manhattan headquarters. The service will cover major national weather events and integrate dozens of local forecasters from Fox’s regional affiliate stations.

The Weather Channel is already casting some shade.

“They didn’t even get a headline about the Tropical Storm Bill,” said Nora Zimmett, the network’s chief content officer. a FoxNews.com article Some meteorologists criticized because he claimed a relatively benign storm posed a “major” risk to the East Coast.

“I applaud Fox’s entry into the weather space, but they should definitely leave life-saving information to the experts,” said Ms. Zimmett, who worked at Fox News in the 2000s. He said climate change is “too important to be politicized, and they would be doing Americans a disservice if they did.”

A Fox Weather spokesperson responded: “While The Weather Channel is focusing on trolling, FoxNews.com For unrelated stories, Fox Weather is busy preparing the debut of our innovative platform to provide critical coverage to an incredibly underserved market.”

Climate change is a broad-based concern. one Pew Research survey In April, it found that 59 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe human activity is contributing to climate change. (For Democrats and those with Democratic-leaning views, the figure is 91 percent.)

Still, some of Fox News’ conservative commentators, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlsonhave a history of underestimating, if not denying, the threat of climate change. The issue even caused division within the Murdoch family: Rupert Murdoch’s younger son, James Murdoch, scolded last year, after Murdoch-owned media outlets in Australia dismissed climate change as the culprit of deadly bushfires. destroyed the country.



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