The Media Cannot Be Complacent as the World Burns

We at Extinction Rebellion Seattle and other west coast chapters are concerned with the lack of meaningful news coverage of the Climate and Ecological disaster we are living in. This article is a summary of an article written in 2019 by the founders of Covering Climate Now. It was so enlightening to me, I want to share it with my readers. The link to the full article is at the end.

Climate silence continues to reign across the bulk of the US news media, especially on television, where most Americans still get their news, the brutal demands of ratings and money work against adequate coverage of the biggest story of our time.

Many newspapers, too, are failing the climate test. When the scientists of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report, warning that humanity had a mere 12 years to radically slash greenhouse-gas emissions or face a calamitous future in which hundreds of millions of people worldwide would go hungry or homeless or worse. Only 22 of the 50 biggest newspapers in the United States covered that report.

We need to take urgent action to slow human-caused warming, but the media has spent too long airing the opinions of people who do not believe there is cause for alarm, which makes the problem seem less dire than it actually is. False balance reporting has damaged the public’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and lead audiences to doubt the scientific consensus on societal challenges like climate change.

Instead of sleepwalking us toward disaster, the US news media need to remember their Paul Revere responsibilities — to awaken, inform, and rouse the people to action. A livable future requires radically transforming energy, agriculture, transportation, construction, and other core sectors of the global economy. This means that the news sector must be transformed just as radically.

There is a runaway train racing toward us, and its name is climate change. That is not alarmism; it is scientific fact. We, as a civilization, urgently need to slow that train down and help as many people off the tracks as possible. The US mainstream news media, unlike major news outlets in Europe and independent media in the US, have played a big part in getting it wrong for many years.

News stories about extreme-weather events almost never mention climate change, though scientists have been drawing the connection for decades. Instead, human-interest fluff prevails. This journalistic failure has given rise to a calamitous public ignorance, which in turn has enabled politicians and corporations to avoid action. US media have a history of covering the incremental at the expense of the immense and of coddling rather than confronting corporate power. Surely, it can do better.

Just as the world, especially the United States, needs radical change to mitigate the coming crisis, so too for the news media… This subject must be kept front and center, with the pressure on and the stakes made abundantly clear at every turn.

Climate change touches virtually every beat in the newsroom, meaning that nearly every journalist has something to contribute to its coverage. For business reporters, climate change will tank the world economy if we follow the scientific imperative of leaving most remaining fossil fuels in the ground leaving investors holding trillions of dollars in “stranded assets.” Food production, national security, human health, immigration, even the viability of baseball in increasingly hot summers — climate change touches nearly every aspect of American life and every facet of the American press.

The failure of news organizations to adequately cover the story is structural rather than the fault of environmental-beat reporters or climate experts. If anything, those journalists are the drum-beating exceptions to the news industry’s problem. The shortfall is everywhere else — newsroom managers have failed to see the climate crisis as fundamental, all-encompassing, and worthy of attention from every journalist on their payrolls.

For some time now, by far the best daily reporting on climate change has come from The Guardian, which covers the science, politics, economics, and health aspects throughout the world with great force and clarity. US outlets are increasing coverage, but not to the level needed.

The American news media’s center of gravity remains the television networks and their local affiliates. The sad fact is that the US media as a whole and television in particular have downplayed and distorted the climate story from the beginning, with devastating consequences. A big part of the reason our civilization today faces the prospect of extinction is that we have waited so long to take action, not least because the media left the public and policy-makers misinformed about the threat and its solutions. When the media weren’t ignoring the story, they were being suckered into misrepresenting it as more of a matter of political opinion than of scientific fact.

Had the news media improved coverage decades ago, we’d be looking at a much different story, but they didn’t. As a result, politicians feel no pressure to act, and the emissions keep climbing. Now is the time for the media to keep the issue front and center, with the pressure on and the stakes made abundantly clear at every turn.

For decades, ExxonMobil and the rest of the fossil-fuel industry deliberately deceived the press and thereby the public. But the fossil-fuel industry’s lies succeeded only because US news organizations swallowed the industry’s propaganda and regurgitated it as supposedly objective news. The result was to mislead the American people and their elected representatives about the perils of climate change and to blunt any sense of urgency about reacting.

This journalistic failure has been a uniquely American one. Major news outlets in Britain, Germany and other countries did not fall for the industry’s disinformation campaign, nor did independent media in the United States.

Few US news outlets still apply false equivalence to climate science today, but the underlying error — treating climate change as a political dispute rather than a scientific reality — continues to undermine coverage. For example, mainstream reporting has failed spectacularly to perform the essential journalistic task of describing what a Green New Deal would do — mobilize the US government and economy to fight climate change by retooling energy, transportation, agriculture, and other sectors to create millions of jobs and business opportunities, much as the New Deal of the 1930s countered the Great Depression.

Network TV coverage obsessed about what a Green New Deal would mean for Democratic and Republican prospects on Capitol Hill. Such coverage is an example of tactical framing, that not only deprives the public of the information needed to inform voters but also increases cynicism about whether the policy under discussion will be implemented.

Most Green New Deal coverage has also ignored the climate science, failing to explain that, at this late date, a crash program to decarbonize is the only hope for keeping the temperature rise near 1.5°C. As a result, the Green New Deal’s critics — notably congressional Republicans — have been able to act as if that scientific imperative doesn’t exist.

What can a newsroom do?

Follow the leaders. Emulate outlets that are already covering climate change well. You can’t do better than The Guardian, which has been running incisive stories and commentary for years. It has a team of full-time reporters and editors who focus on climate developments in Europe, the US, and the rest of the world. Part of the reason The Guardian can afford to do so is that its journalism is subsidized by a trust, freeing it of the business-model tensions faced by most other major news outlets. So one urgent question remains: If more news organizations are going to do justice to the story of climate change, how can such coverage be funded? Foundations like Knight, Ford, McCormick, and Emerson Collective are rightly increasing their support for local news organizations across the country. Other foundations should join this effort and earmark budgets for climate coverage at the local level.

Take an “All In” approach. Know the science, focus on substance, attract eyeballs without being frivolous, and include women and people of color in the discussion.

It’s a sad truism that the impacts of climate change punish nonwhite, non-male, non-affluent people the most, yet this point is rarely made in mainstream coverage, in part because the coverage is dominated by white men.

Don’t blame the audience, and listen to the kids. The onus is on news organizations to craft the story in ways that will demand the attention of readers and viewers. A majority of Americans are interested in climate change and want to hear what can be done about it. This is especially true of the younger people that news organizations covet as an audience. Even most young Republicans want climate action.

Establish a diverse climate desk, but don’t silo climate coverage. The climate story is too important and multidimensional for a news outlet not to have a designated team covering it. That team must have members who reflect the economic, racial, and gender diversity of America; if not, the coverage will miss crucial aspects of the story and fail to connect with important audiences. At the same time, climate change is so far-reaching that connections should be made when reporting on nearly every topic. For example, an economics reporter could partner with a climate reporter to cover the case for a just transition: the need to help workers and communities that have long relied on fossil fuel, such as the coal regions of Appalachia, transition to a clean-energy economy, as the Green New Deal envisions.

Learn the science. Many journalists have long had a bias toward the conceptual. But you can’t do justice to the climate crisis if you don’t understand the scientific facts, in particular how insanely late the hour is. At this point, anyone suggesting a leisurely approach to slashing emissions is not taking the science seriously.

Don’t internalize the spin. Not only do most Americans care about climate change, but an overwhelming majority support a Green New Deal. The media should not give credence to wild assertions about what a Green New Deal would do or cost. The data simply do not support such accusations. But breaking free from this ideological trap requires another step.

Help the heartland. Some of the places being hit hardest by climate change, such as the Midwestern states flooded this spring, have little access to real climate news; instead, the denial peddled by Fox News dominates. Iconic TV newsman Bill Moyers has an antidote: “Suppose you formed a consortium of media that could quickly act as a strike force to show how a disaster like this is related to climate change — not just for the general media, but for agricultural media, heartland radio stations, local television outlets. A huge teachable moment could be at hand if there were a small coordinating nerve center of journalists who could energize reporting, op-eds, interviews, and so on that connect the public to the causes and not just the consequences of events like this.” Moyers added that such a team should “always have on standby a pool of the most reputable scientists who, on camera and otherwise, can connect natural disasters to the latest and most credible scientific research.”

Cover the solutions. There isn’t a more exciting time to be on the climate beat. That may sound strange, considering how much suffering lies in store from the impacts that are already locked in. Reporters have a tendency to gravitate to the crime scene, to the tragedy. They have a harder time with the solutions to a problem; some even mistake it as fluff. Now, with climate change, the solution is a critical part of the story.

Don’t be afraid to point fingers. Some entities are resolutely opposed to doing what the science says is needed. ExxonMobil plans to keep producing large amounts of oil and gas through at least 2040; other companies have made similar declarations. If enacted, those plans guarantee catastrophe. Journalism has a responsibility to make that consequence clear to the public and to cover the companies, executives, and investors behind those plans accordingly.

The companies that funded the disinformation, the Republicans (plus a handful of Democrats) who carried their water on Capitol Hill, and the right-wing media machine that injected their lies into the public consciousness continue to be treated as legitimate participants in the debate. But these entities in fact deserve to have their social licenses revoked, just as tobacco companies did. More than anyone else, it is climate deniers who got us into this mess; they don’t get to decide what we do about it now.

If American journalism doesn’t get the climate story right, soon no other story will matter. The news media’s past climate failures can be redeemed only by an immediate shift to more high-profile, inclusive, and fearless coverage. Our collective survival demands nothing less.

Adapted from The media are complacent while the world burns

By MARK HERTSGAARD AND KYLE POPE, the founders of Covering Climate Now.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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