“LATEST NEWS” item on FoxNews.com front page linked not to news story, but to Republican blog post

The front page of FoxNews.com contained a headline under the “LATEST NEWS” tab that read “Report: Over 400 Scientists Dispute Man-Made Warming,” the link to which led to a post on the blog of Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) -- not a news report.

On December 21, the front page of FoxNews.com contained a headline under the “LATEST NEWS” tab that read “Report: Over 400 Scientists Dispute Man-Made Warming.” However, the purported “LATEST NEWS” item did not link to a news report but, rather, to a post on “The Inhofe EPW Press Blog,” the blog of Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), ranking minority member on the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

The headline on the post to which the FoxNews.com headline linked states: “U.S. Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007: Senate Report Debunks 'Consensus.' ” But as the post itself makes clear, the report was not put out by the U.S. Senate or by the full Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, but by the “office of the GOP Ranking Member.”

The headline also appeared in the “SCITECH” section of the FoxNews.com front page on December 21, and the link led to the same Inhofe post.

Media Matters for America noted that on the December 6, 2006, edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, correspondent Molly Henneberg uncritically aired Inhofe's false claim that "[i]t was warmer in the '30s than it is today" and Inhofe's baseless assertion that “it was warmer in the 15th century than it is today.” Also, during an interview on the November 28, 2006, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, Inhofe asserted that there is no “relationship between manmade gases and global warming,” and co-host Steve Doocy echoed this argument, declaring that Inhofe had made a “great point” because “there's been no scientific connection” established between climate change and human activity. In 2003, Inhofe called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”