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The White House released a comprehensive climate change report on Tuesday. The report, worked on by over 300 scientists and experts and legally mandated by the federal government, presented the facts on man-made global climate change and pointed out what will likely occur in the present and near-future. The US Global Change Research Program and their National Climate Assessments came about during George H.W. Bush’s presidency. The USGCRP is required to release a National Climate Assessment every four years.

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Well, you knew this was coming. On Tuesday, while announcing that the White House had released this report, Fox News’ Bill Hemmer, host of America’s Newsroom, stated that the report was perhaps being used to distract people from the “multiple scandals swirling around the administration.” Obviously, by referencing scandals, Hemmer was stating that a report that was required to be released by the federal government was being used by this President to make people forget about Benghazi. Because, right now, on Fox News, it is Benghazi 24/7. It seems as if Roger Ailes has ordered that for the next few months, it is all Benghazi, all the time.

Below is video of the segment via Media Matters:

Not only did Hemmer make it appear that this report, which has been worked on for quite a while and is mandated to be done by the government, is merely a distraction from Benghazi, he and co-host Martha McCallum presented a statement from notorious climate change denier Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) saying that it was meant to distract from the President’s “regulatory agenda.”

“With this report, the president is attempting to once again distract Americans from his unchecked regulatory agenda that is costing our nation millions of job opportunities and our ability to be energy independent.”

Basically, per Republicans and the conservative media, President Obama cannot discuss anything except for the topics and subjects that conservatives want to talk about. Anything else is a distraction from the narrative that has been set at that moment. Any time there is an attempt to perhaps have an important discussion on policy or social change, conservatives throw up their hands and cry, “Distraction! Distraction! Distraction!” Right now, all Fox News wants to talk about is Benghazi. Therefore, any possible story that isn’t focused squarely on Benghazi (unless it one that makes the President or Democrats look bad) has to be, by definition, a distraction.

Therefore, despite this report presenting us with the dire economic and environmental impacts to this nation and planet if we continue not to act in regards to climate change, and pointing out that we’ve already seen the effects that climate change has had on our nation’s economy, Fox News and the rest of conservative media is going to conveniently toss this all aside as the President’s attempt to make everyone forget about Benghazi. It will be interesting how history looks back at this period of time, when a large section of our nation’s population decided it wasn’t worth their time and effort to be concerned about real and large-scale problems, and instead just wanted to focus on their own animus towards a black man being in the White House.