Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Climate action advocates are demanding MSM broadcast more climate change content, even if nobody wants to watch.
The Media Are Complacent While the World Burns
But there’s a brand-new playbook for journalists fighting for a 1.5°C world.
By Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope
APRIL 22, 2019Last summer, during the deadliest wildfire season in California’s history, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes got into a revealing Twitter discussion about why US television doesn’t much cover climate change. Elon Green, an editor at Longform, had tweeted, “Sure would be nice if our news networks—the only outlets that can force change in this country—would cover it with commensurate urgency.” Hayes (who is an editor at large for The Nation) replied that his program had tried. Which was true: In 2016, All In With Chris Hayes spent an entire week highlighting the impact of climate change in the US as part of a look at the issues that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were ignoring. The problem, Hayes tweeted, was that “every single time we’ve covered [climate change] it’s been a palpable ratings killer. So the incentives are not great.”
The Twittersphere pounced. “TV used to be obligated to put on programming for the public good even if it didn’t get good ratings. What happened to that?” asked @JThomasAlbert. @GalJaya said, “Your ‘ratings killer’ argument against covering #climatechange is the reverse of that used during the 2016 primary when corporate media justified gifting Trump $5 billion in free air time because ‘it was good for ratings,’ with disastrous results for the nation.”
When @mikebaird17 urged Hayes to invite Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University, one of the best climate-science communicators around, onto his show, she tweeted that All In had canceled on her twice—once when “I was literally in the studio w[ith] the earpiece in my ear”—and so she wouldn’t waste any more time on it.
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Without a serious and immediate correction, the press will continue down the same path with climate change, except this time the implications are exponentially greater. Surely, it can do better.
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If American journalism doesn’t get the climate story right—and 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 #CoveringClimateNow project calls on all journalists and news outlets to join the conversation about how to make that happen. As the nation’s founders envisioned long ago, the role of a free press is to inform the people and hold the powerful accountable. These days, our collective survival demands nothing less.
Read more: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/climate-change-media.php
I’m pretty sure the definition of a free press includes the right not to surrender to pressure to repeatedly broadcast boring special interest group propaganda.
Freedom of speech must allow all kinds of stupid and subversive stuff of course, but I don’t think that Madison and Jefferson would have supported the proposition that the dissemination of anti-Constitutional neoMarxist propaganda is a blessing to the nation.
Freedom loving individuals tend to develop pretty good mental filters and mental detectors for subversive bullschist propaganda.
It is sure gratifying to learn that TV remote controls are being reached for en masse when Climate Change propaganda flashes up on the screen.
Hayhoe, Hayhoe, it’s off to spin she goes.
What new thing does anyone expect a climate change TV show to show?
It’s the end of the world!!!
Yes, we know. It has been for the last thirty years. Call us when something new happens.
That’s why they are reduced to stampeding walruses and elderly polar bears. They haven’t got anything new to tell us.
And we have all worked out that it’s not a priority.
Precisely! I think some contributors here are a little too pessimistic as to the general public’s attitude. The harder the CAGW drum is banged, the less of us listen, this much is clear, ably evinced by the sheer effort of recent heavily orchestrated campaigns such as Extinction Rebellion and its openly receptive media coverage. It is the (relatively few) noisy zealots that forge further and further into ideological oblivion with CAGW, irrespective of actual observation that contradicts their assertions and the likely negative impacts of their so-called solutions.
Most of us may not take too much notice of it and don’t rail against it, because the financial cost and personal freedoms being eroded are not hurting enough people, yet. Most politicians who purport to support the notion realize this and do what they think they can get away with. There will be a ‘squeal point’, at which a sufficient number of registered voters just turn against the narrative and give a two fingered salute to its political advocates. Personally, I don’t think we’re at that point yet, but election results could be interpreted to suggest we’re getting closer. When advocates seeking election on the CAGW ticket just don’t get elected, they will migrate away from it, because being elected is more important. No amount of virtue signalling and promises of future back handers to king makers behind the scenes count for anything if the voters don’t give them their meal ticket.
So I’m a massive supporter of rabid CAGW zealots, the harder they dig, the quicker they sink their ship!
Katharine Hayhoe looks like what Chelsea Clinton will look like in 20 years, if she dies her hair red. Scary thought.
“I’m pretty sure the definition of a free press includes the right not to surrender to pressure to repeatedly broadcast boring special interest group propaganda.”
The left is not interested in your freedoms, only theirs.
LOL, “climate-science communicators”. I think they mean propagandists.
Wouldn’t the correct action be to cancel all television production. I can think of few carbon sinks bigger than television and movie production. Add to that the resources consumed manufacturing, marketing, delivering, and using a television and I should think the enviros would want to ban the whole idea outright. Yeah, I know, hypocrites recognize no hypocrisy.
She has crazy eyes. Be very cautious when near her.
I think there is some ratings potential if the “great climate communicator” from Texas Tech could be part of a remake of “1984” or “Fahrenheit 451” with the climate insanity communicated by dear leaders incessantly with no off button on the monitors.
Fortunately, we live in a world with media in headlong retreat.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-sees-most-newspapers-120000707.html
The decline of advertising gradually turned the newspaper industry “from monopoly to franchise to competitive,” the billionaire chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. And now most newspapers are “toast.”
It’s the Green Church Lady!
“….our news networks—the only outlets that can force change in this country…” That quote is downright frightening.