CNN ‘Fact Check’ Turns Into An OOOO NOOOO

The Protection Racket Media often laments: Why don’t Americans trust us any more? It must be all the misinformation!

And oddly enough, that’s one correct answer — except that the misinformation is coming from the media itself. Mainstream media outlets offer an endless variety of “fact checks” that usually turn out to be tendentious political arguments instead. And on rare occasions where they aren’t, they are as often as not just flat-out wrong. 

Although perhaps not quite as wrong as CNN’s Bill Weir, who “fact checked” the EPA without, y’know, checking facts. Here’s the clip from the segment, with the big reveal hidden for now, in which Weir accuses the EPA of a “shoot first, fill out the press release later” approach:

Another media “fact check” face plant where the fact checker doesn’t have the slightest clue what he’s talking about. “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”. pic.twitter.com/adPkShbPHS

— Lee Zeldin (@epaleezeldin) March 13, 2025

BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT: It is the chainsaw effect that we’ve been watching all these weeks. Famously, President Trump promised oil executives carte blanche when it came to deregulation. In today’s event, which is actually time to the biggest energy conference in Houston, today, Lee Zeldin put out a video on X and 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.

We have one of those there, “Trump EPA announces 0000.” You can see there, it’s sort of shoot first, fill out the press release later. They’re going after, of course, as you mentioned, vehicle emissions, tailpipe emissions, power plant pollution, mercury pollution that comes out of there, coal, wastewater, oil and gas, coal ash, reporting CO2, industries just kind of keeping a tally on how much planet coke (ph) and pollution they’re putting in to the sea and sky. They no need to do that anymore.

Now, a lot of this is symbolic. It still has to go through the courts, it has to go through Congress, but it just is the latest in an all-out war on science, around public health, around the environment, and of course, around the climate crisis. It’s going to affect everything on earth eventually. But in the near term, it’ll be the folks who have struggled with the biggest costs of our economies, folks who live next to factories and toxic waste sites.

Did the EPA rush out an announcement while forgetting to update some boilerplate in its official statement? No it did not, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin responded on Twitter/X. Those aren’t zeroes, they are four capital Os — because that is a specific statute heading:

Another media “fact check” face plant where the fact checker doesn’t have the slightest clue what he’s talking about. “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”.

And indeed, a quick DuckDuckGo search for “40 CFR Part 60 Subpart OOOO” — the part used in the visual presentation of Weir’s ‘fact check’ — brings us this precise statute in the National Archives and elsewhere. The most straightforward listing comes from Cornell Law School:

40 CFR Subpart OOOO – Subpart OOOO—Standards of Performance for Crude Oil and Natural Gas Facilities for Which Construction, Modification, or Reconstruction Commenced After August 23, 2011, and on or Before September 18, 2015

OOOO NOOOO, Mr. Bill! Who exactly is shooting first and asking questions later?

And in this case, I must also correct myself. This is both a tendentious political argument and flat-out wrong on the facts. It’s a twofer!

This is precisely why trust in media is hitting bottom — and then digging:

GALLUP: Americans’ trust in the mass media is at its lowest point in more than five decades. pic.twitter.com/EBwH7h3Nd2

— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) February 27, 2025

About two-thirds of Americans in the 1970s trusted the “mass media — such as newspapers, TV and radio” either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to “[report] the news fully, accurately and fairly.” By the next measurement in 1997, confidence had fallen to 53%, and it has gradually trended downward since 2003. Americans are now divided into rough thirds, with 31% trusting the media a great deal or a fair amount, 33% saying they do “not [trust it] very much,” and 36%, up from 6% in 1972, saying they have no trust at all in it.

Perhaps the media might start thinking about trying a new approach … such as reporting facts and doing research, rather than find ways to push false narratives. Or at least do a basic Internet search on press releases before televising your terminal case of projection. 

Addendum: The Protection Racket Media has gone full-out to propagandize for the Bureaucratic State. And so far, it’s not working — but we need to make sure that independent platforms like ours remain in play to fight against it. Please join the fight! Become a HotAir VIP member or upgrade your existing membership today and use the code FIGHT for 60% off and get the media deal of a lifetime!