What is the number one rule of fact checking? Make sure you have your facts straight.
CNN reporter Bill Weir learned that the hard way earlier this month when he tried to call out the Trump administration for publishing press releases with typos. As it turns out, what he believed was an overlooked placeholder in an announcement from the Environmental Protection Agency was actually a correct reference to federal code.
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin wasted no time pointing out the error and, in the process, forcing CNN to correct the record. On Wednesday’s show, Megyn was joined by National Review’s Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cooke to discuss the fact check fail and the downfall of corporate media.
The Fact Check Fail
CNN chief climate correspondent Bill Weir was a guest on Kaitlan Collins on The Source last week when he claimed the EPA was moving so fast it was making mistakes.
“Today Lee Zeldin put out a video on X, they were putting out press releases with such a flurry, about 31 different actions and rollbacks, that some of them had typos or placeholders at the top,” Weir claimed. “We have one of those there [on screen], ‘Trump EPA announces 000…’ You can see there.”
The press release he was referring to was published March 12 as part of the EPA’s “most consequential day of deregulation,” which Zeldin said in a video message included taking 31 actions to “advance President Trump’s Day 1” executive orders to “Power the Great American Comeback.”
The headline on the release in question was “Trump EPA Announces OOOO b/c Reconsideration of Biden-Harris Rules Strangling American Energy Producers,” and Weir apparently believed the “OOOO” was placeholder text that someone forgot to remove. “It‘s sort of, ‘Shoot first, fill out the press release later,'” Weir told Collins.
While Weir holds the distinction of being CNN’s “chief climate correspondent,” he does not seem to be up on federal regulatory code. “Another media ‘fact check’ face plant where the fact-checker doesn’t have the slightest clue what he’s talking about,” Zeldin posted on X along with the CNN clip. “‘OOOO b/c’ is not a typo. 40 CFR Part 60 Subpart OOOO, or Quad O, is a federal reg under the Clean Air Act. Also, those aren’t zeroes, it’s the letter ‘O.'”
In the same interview, Weir also called the EPA’s actions under Zeldin mostly “symbolic” but claimed they amount to an “all-out war on science around public health, around the environment, and of course, around the climate crisis.”
Activist Journalism
Megyn said such rhetoric is nothing new from Weir. “No one knows who he is, but, being in the business and on cable news, I’ve been watching this guy for years and he is as rabid a partisan as they come,” Megyn said. “This is what happens when your left-wing activism blinds your obligations as a reporter.”
While Lowry admitted he would have had no idea what “OOOO” stood for, he is also not claiming to be a subject matter expert. “We all have our moments and I wouldn’t have known what all those Os are, but I’m not an environmental reporter,” he noted. “So this is hugely embarrassing.”
Cooke said the failed fact check further undermines the credibility of so-called experts. “For years now, there’s been this back and forth in the court between the law as it was written by Congress and the EPA interpretation of it. Thankfully, many of the cases have gone the way of Congressional will in recent years, but, every time they do, we get these dissents from people like [U.S. Supreme Court Justices] Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor in which they laud the ‘experts’ in the community and say we should just be giving them carte blanche to do whatever they want,” he explained. “And then we see one [‘expert’] on television absolutely beclowning himself, and we realize why we have the system that we have. It is very, very embarrassing.”
It is a result, he added, of the media not doing its job. “It is also what happens when, for years, you know that the media is on your side and just will reflexively back you and publish your talking points as if they were facts,” Cooke noted. “You become lazy and flabby.”
Megyn agreed. “[Weir] ultimately was forced, after being publicly shamed, to issue a correction on CNN… That is good. That is a bare minimum that is required of people,” she concluded. “But if you look at this guy’s actual reporting… I would submit for the record that Bill Weir’s quote ‘mistake’… was no mistake at all. It was an agenda masquerading as journalism, which is why he got humiliated.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Cooke and Lowry by tuning in to episode 1,030 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.