Chris White Tech Reporter April 16, 2020 8:41 PM ET
- A project co-founded by the Columbia Journalism Review is asking hundreds of news outlets to focus their reporting on climate change on Earth Day as journalists focus primarily on coronavirus coverage.
- The journalist heading the effort believes the media should be devoting the same level of attention to global warming as they do to a virus that has killed more than 100,000 people worldwide.
- Energy analysts and critics told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the project’s founders are “disconnected” from reality and are focusing on a vague problem while Americans are trying to “stay alive” and keep their jobs.”
Hundreds of media outlets, including Reuters, are partnering with a project seeking to devote a week of coverage to climate change amid a pandemic that has killed more than 140,00 people worldwide.
The founders behind Covering Climate Now are asking their network of more than 400 media outlets to blanket the airwaves with stories about climate change during the week of Earth Day. Reuters, Bloomberg News, and The Daily Beast are among the biggest names listed as partners of the project.
Covering Climate Now, founded in 2019, announced the event on Feb. 5, before local and state governments began mitigation efforts to halt the spread of the pandemic. One of the project’s founding groups, the Columbia Journalism Review, represents professional journalists and focuses primarily on journalism ethics.
Covering Climate Now’s partners published a deluge of climate-related news in September 2019 ahead of the U.N. Climate Action Summit, held Sept. 15-23. It is now asking its media partners to renew their efforts, moving from discussing climate change to tackling potential solutions.
The latest effort is slated to happen April 19-26 and is soliciting coverage addressing solutions such as putting “a price on carbon” and halting “fossil fuel subsidies, as well as political actions to advance such policies,” Covering Climate Now notes on its event page.
The project’s co-founder, Mark Hertsgaard, has said news outlets should be devoting the same amount of time to climate change as they do COVID-19. The disease, which is caused by the novel coronavirus, originated in China before landing on the shores of the United States, where it has killed more than 25,000 people.
“Stories on other subjects have all but disappeared, and some newsrooms have halted production on non-coronavirus stories altogether,” Hertsgaard wrote in a March 25 blog post contrasting how the news outlets cover climate change with how they treat a pandemic.
Hertsgaard goes on to lament the gap he sees between coverage of coronavirus and climate change. (RELATED: Exclusive: Inside The Media Conspiracy To Hype Greta Thunberg)
“While this is understandable given the scope of the COVID-19 threat,” Hertsgaard notes, “it is bizarre that the climate crisis has never been accorded comparable importance, even though it too stands to upend, impoverish, and even end the lives of countless people the world over.”
Hertsgaard has not responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s repeated requests for comment about the Covering Climate Now project. He told CJR editor and publisher, Kyle Pope, in September 2019 that the project “has an aroma” of “activism” in the minds of many journalists.
The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal have not responded to the DCNF’s request for comment explaining why they are not taking part in Covering Climate Now. (RELATED: Exclusive: Inside The Media Conspiracy To Hype Greta Thunberg)
Hertsgaard told Pope that he’s trying to change that perception. There were roughly 200 outlets involved in the partnership last September when Covering Climate Now was requesting reporters blanket news coverage with climate stories. The project has since approximately doubled.
“Partnering with Covering Climate Now to provide access to a selection of Reuters new and existing climate coverage free of charge allows other members to make the issue more accessible to their audiences, should they choose,” Reuters spokeswoman Deepal Patadia told TheDCNF.
Patadia did not address to what degree Reuters would should be shifting their focus away from the pandemic. Reuters joined the project in December 2019, less than three months after Covering Climate Now’s initial climate coverage kicked off in September of that year.
Bloomberg News, The Daily Beast, and CJR have not responded to requests for comment. Neither Bloomberg nor The Daily Beast have confirmed whether they will participate in the upcoming effort.
BuzzFeed participated in the project’s effort in September but chose not to be involved in next week’s climate coverage initiative, spokesman Matt Mittenthal told the DCNF without providing an explanation. BuzzFeed is still listed among Covering Climate Now’s partners.
Energy analysts and other critics, meanwhile, believe Hertsgaard, Covering Climate Now, and others involved in the project, are disconnected from reality.
“It’s a disconnect with what’s happening in the real world. People are doing the best to flatten the curve, and they’re wringing their hands over climate change,” American Energy Alliance President Tom Pyle told the DCNF. “There is no satisfying these people. It’s an obsession.”
“They want to cover climate change when people are trying to stay alive during a pandemic and keep their jobs or find a new one to provide for their families,” he added.
Pyle said that journalists need to focus their attention on the virus rather than a vague concern about a climate crisis, Pyle noted.
Efforts to mitigate coronavirus have all but left the economy in tatters, with more than 20 million people having filed for unemployment since officials began issuing orders for citizens to shelter in place. Media outlets are focusing the bulk of their resources on reporting out the twists and turns as the virus continues spreading.
Advocacy-style journalism is the new in-thing, according to David Blackmon, an independent consultant and analyst who has nearly 40 years experience in the energy industry.
“I don’t think that anyone would object to any of it if they were upfront about their agenda,” he told the DCNF in November 2019, regarding Covering Climate Now’s first effort. “There’s no effort to properly identify agenda-driven pieces.
“They are backed up with factual information, but it usually tells just half the story. It’s become the norm,” he added. (RELATED: UN’s New Report Shows There’s ‘Little Basis’ For A Favorite Claim Of Climate Activists)
Blackmon, a Forbes contributor, noted that much of the reporting is one-sided and focuses exclusively on one narrative: Climate change must be stopped at any cost. Such reporting rarely gives coverage to the economic consequences of climate activists’ preferred policies, he noted at the time.
Thanks
I’ll take Reuters off my list of apps right now.
Did I see “Journalism ethics” in that article?
That must be the ultimate oxymoron
That also explains the coordinated wave of coverage all across the country in all sizes of media outlets leading up to the Paris climate agreement. It was no random process and probably not free “news” coverage either.
UK government may have to pay wind farms to SHUT DOWN as demand for electricity drops 20 per cent during pandemic with offices, schools and factories closed.
they pay generators who have contracted power but then the contract is broken by too much capacity, or it is being generated and cannot be transported to where needed
see the following graphic for the drop in power usage.
https://gridwatch.co.uk/
Because the people of the world need another crisis* to worry about? I think the Covid-19 ChiCom Wuhan virus** pandemic has met the demand for that.
* Fake crisis
** Still not convinced the virus is worse than a bad flu season. Completely convinced our lockdowns are designed for maximum destruction of the American economy. Perhaps that wasn’t the intent of our questionable government bureaucrats when they advised lockdowns, but that’s what the Democrats are turning it into.
I think the lockdown have a primary aim of humiliating the populace and enabling *sshole cops. (That’s an in kind reward for stupid cops. Cheaper than paying them correctly.)
Destroying the Western economy is the secondary goal.
Columbia Journalism Review is funded by by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and what craigslsist trafficking enterprise. See https://defyccc.com/craigslist/
When the Green Mob actually have a better alternative the world will beat a path to their door. But that’s just not the case is it?
Instead we get a steady stream of false news, outright lies, exaggerations, and many, many, many failed predictions.
Please just stop the CO2 lies and let’s get on with real priorities!
In normal business, colluding with competitors to stitch up your market is illegal.
Mortal peril has a way of refocusing most human minds on essential priorities, as the Wuhan virus clearly demonstrates. The nebulously termed ‘Climate Change’ is not one of our priorities. Not even close. The accumulating lint in the dryer vent hose presents a greater real peril (fire) to a human than our ever changing, non-alarming, naturally changing climates. If you’re ‘locked down’ at home anyway, consider adding cleaning the clothes dryer exhaust hose and vent to your ‘To Do’ list.
Lots of MSM coverage of impeachment. It didn’t stick.
Lots of MSM coverage of Corona. (Eventally) It won’t stick.
Both are to short term to fuel “The Cause”.
Time to get the MSM back to the “scare” that can’t be measured during our lifetimes.
Not only that, but the three years of anti Russia hysteria (culminating in Ukraine, bizarrely) makes the blind acceptation of China’s numbers even more problematic.
The media could combine COVID-19 and climate change™ by ‘covering’ the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression (IMF) and its effect on the trend in the atmospheric CO2 concentration.
For instance on March 18 it was 414 ppm and on April 17 it was 417 ppm.
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/monthly.html
How is it NOT an in kind contribution to a political campaign?
Where is the FEC? (Where would it be it President Trump did not voluntarily paralyse it?)
Disband the FEC. (And the FBI, for other reasons.)
From the article: “Hundreds of media outlets, including Reuters, are partnering with a project seeking to devote a week of coverage to climate change amid a pandemic that has killed more than 140,00 people worldwide.”
That ought to go over well with the public. Here they are, already stressed out over the Wuhan virus, and then the propaganda machine formerly known as the news media, wants to stress them out even more over a fake human-caused climate change crisis. They are doing psychological harm to a lot of people.
This begins with an understanding of where we are now … mixing ‘liberal ideas’ with ‘ideas from the left’ is hard to get away from … here’s the best separation of those two that I’ve found: https://www.prageru.com/video/left-or-liberal/ in the end is the media “liberal’ or ‘leftist’ as that will really make a difference on how to approach a solution.