Despite the Trump administration’s decision to release it on Black Friday, a new federal government report about climate change made headlines anyway. The 1,600-page Fourth National Climate Assessment, which details how global warming is already damaging the United States, got significant airtime on the prime-time cable news programs this Sunday.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that, during that airtime, non-experts made numerous false and misleading statements about the climate report and the scientists who wrote it. Those statements went largely unchallenged by the journalists in charge of gatekeeping the conversations.

It’s difficult to challenge falsehoods in real-time. But that’s why high-profile political journalists like Chuck Todd and George Stephanopoulos get paid the big bucks. Plus, the majority of falsehoods spread about climate change on Sunday’s news programs weren’t exactly new or novel. They were the same global warming talking points Republicans have been using for several years. They’re all easily refutable. There’s no reason why prominent political journalists shouldn’t be able to do it by now.

Take, for example, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s comments on CNN’s State of the Union. “We know that our climate is changing,” she said. “Our climate always changes, and we see those ebb and flows through time.” This is perhaps the most-repeated Republican climate change talking point in the history of Republican climate change talking points. Its sole purpose is to imply that the changes we’re seeing right now are normal—which is objectively untrue. Despite regional variations, the earth’s climate as a whole has been stable for the last 12,000 years. Now, all of a sudden, it’s warming more quickly than any time in the last 66 million years. What evidence does Senator Ernst have that this is merely a coincidence? Why didn’t the show’s host, Dana Bash, ask her?

Or take Danielle Pletka’s comments on NBC’s Meet the Press. Pletka is a foreign and defense policy expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute—she’s “not a scientist,” she told Chuck Todd on Sunday. Because of that, she said she doesn’t know whether global warming is human-caused. But she does know this: “We just had two of the coldest years, biggest drop in global temperatures that we’ve had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years,” Pletka said. “We don’t talk about that, because it’s not part of the agenda.”