Laura Ingraham cites BBC article to claim “Trump was right” about wildfires, skips every mention of climate change

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

On her radio program, Laura Ingraham read extensively from a BBC article examining President Donald Trump's claim that forest management was to blame for this month's catastrophic California wildfires, cherrypicking parts of it to claim that “Trump was right.” 

But the article noted that Trump's comments were “criticised by some experts who say they ignore the bigger picture of climate change and population shifts in the state” and that “Many experts point out that climate change has made things worse, leading to higher temperatures, lower humidity and changes in wind and rainfall patterns.” Ingraham omitted all mentions of climate change in the article, going so far as to skip over the words in the middle of a sentence. The article included the following quote from one expert:

“But in the recent century or so, the emphasis has been on putting out any fires - and with climate change this has now created a tinderbox of vegetation,” Prof Doerr told BBC News.

But Ingraham read the quote like this:

But in the recent times, or like, when you say recent, like, the last century or so, the emphasis has been on putting out any fires, Prof Doerr told BBC News.
 

From the November 19 edition of Courtside Entertainment Group's The Laura Ingraham Show:

LAURA INGRAHAM (CO-HOST): The president was compassionate and also, I think, very forthright about why we have the number of fires and the intensity of the fires that we have today. And he was ridiculed and maligned when he sent out the tweet about forest management. But there was that piece -- I believe we posted it last week in the BBC, I'll pull it up if not -- about how forest management is important and how natural burns are important for clearing out the undergrowth and the underbrush.

...

The more I read about all of this, the more I think Trump was right. There's too much dead wood that needs to be cleared, underbrush and dead wood. And what happens, and Raymond you've been to some of these areas, is you have people building in these canyons. When the fire hits these canyons it rolls up and down with the winds, and it is -- you can't believe people are actually building in these canyons. You can say, were they ever meant to be built in? Mother Nature has a way of taking it back. It's horrible, and the devastation is heartbreaking, but it's hard to fight fires in these areas and it's hard to manage the forests in these areas. 

Previously:

National broadcast TV news mentioned climate change in less than 4 percent of California wildfire coverage

ABC, CBS, and NBC largely failed to connect climate change to extreme wildfires this summer

MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle calls out Trump for ignoring climate change and falsely blaming wildfires on forest mismanagement