Take a moment to consider the phrase “Joe Biden’s hard-hat environmentalism” that appeared in a recent Associated Press article. Examining Biden’s controversial energy policy and assigning it the positive spin of “hard-hat environmentalism” is something that makes sense as a White House press release or something from the Biden campaign, but not the AP, a purported objective carrier of the news.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident.
One recent analysis found AP stories mentioned the phrases “climate change,” “global warming,” and “Climate disaster” hundreds of times since receiving grants totaling $8 million in early 2022. The stated purpose of the money is to fund the AP’s “Climate Journalism Initiative,” which would employ 20 new reporters to “transform how the AP covers the climate story.”
Perhaps it also funded the story that gave us Biden’s hard-hat environmentalism?
In another example from the story, former top Clinton adviser John Podesta is heavily quoted in his role as overseer of the $369 billion for green energy from Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act. The story fails to mention Podesta’s political operative past, including his unofficial title of “White House clean-up chief” during the Clinton years. Also quoted are the extreme eco-groups the Natural Resources Defense Council and Center for Biological Diversity. They are all given a lot of space in a story with a lot of reach.
As a wire service, the hard-hat rebranding from the AP will appear in thousands of newspapers across the world as news. We don’t know if the millions
