By Chris Sommerfeldt
New York Daily News
NEW YORK — The friends at Fox News were a bit too cordial with Scott Pruitt.
The conservative news network disciplined several “Fox & Friends” producers Tuesday after previously undisclosed emails revealed they had allowed the former Environmental Protection Agency czar to pre-approve interview scripts before going on air — a practice that’s widely frowned upon in media circles.
The emails, which were obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by the Sierra Club and first reported by the Daily Beast, lay out an ethically dubious pattern of communication between Pruitt’s deputies and producers of the unabashedly pro-Trump morning show.
In one email chain from May 2017, Pruitt’s press secretary Amy Graham pitched “Fox & Friends” producer Andrew Murray about an interview on the climate change-denying EPA chief’s supposed interest in helping communities that were “poorly served” by the Obama administration.
Murray quickly agreed to bring Pruitt on the next morning’s show and looped in fellow producer Diana Aloi, who promised to check back in with “pre-interview questions on the agreed-upon topic, the new direction of the EPA, and helping communities that were poorly served by the last administration.”
Aloi subsequently asked for “talking points” and Graham gladly sent over some.
Once she was done writing the segment, Aloi reached back out.
“Would this be okay as the setup to his segment?” Aloi asked and attached the following:
“There’s a new direction at the Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump — and it includes a back-to-basics approach. This after the Obama administration left behind a huge mess more than 1,300 super-fund sites which are heavily contaminated — still require clean-ups. So why was President Obama touted as an environmental savior if all these problems still exist?”
Pleased with the fawning opening monologue, Graham wrote back, “Yes —perfect.”
Ahead of another interview with Pruitt in April of this year, a “Fox & Friends” producer sent an email to the EPA press shop with three topics it wanted to cover. The following morning, six of the eight questions asked of Pruitt related to the pre-approved topics. One of the two other questions related to a topic the EPA press staff had successfully pitched to the Trump-friendly Fox Business Network the previous day.
Similarly amicable exchanges occurred on at least one other occasion before Pruitt finally resigned amid a flurry of ethical scandals in July.
A Fox News spokeswoman said several employees have been disciplined over the emails but wouldn’t identify them or specify how they had been reprimanded. “This is not standard practice whatsoever and the matter is being addressed internally with those involved,” the spokeswoman said.
Todd Gitlin, a journalism ethics professor at Columbia University, scoffed at that defense.
“It should have been obvious all along that the better part of the so-called Fox ‘News’ organization is a propaganda apparatus for the Trump administration,” Gitlin told the New York Daily News. “It’s grotesque, but Fox News is grotesque so it doesn’t surprise me.”
