Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Legendary journalist Edward R Murrow famously provided live reports of German tanks crossing the Polish Border. Columbia Journalism Review thinks journalists today should copy his example, and defy their editors when sending reports from the front lines of climate change.
Why Can’t We Call It An Emergency?
By Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope
JUNE 3, 2021TV NEWSMAN BILL MOYERS likes to tell the story of how Edward R. Murrow, the pre-eminent US broadcast journalist of his time, insisted on covering what became Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Murrow’s bosses at CBS News had other priorities; they ordered Murrow’s reporters to cover dance competitions in Hamburg, Paris, and London, explaining that Americans needed some happy news. Murrow wouldn’t do it. “It’ll probably get us fired,” he told his colleagues, but he sent his correspondents to the German-Polish border; they arrived just in time to witness Hitler’s tanks and troops roar into Poland. Suddenly, Europe was at war. And Americans heard about it because journalists at one of the nation’s most influential news outlets defied convention and did their jobs.
Today, all of humanity is under attack, this time from an overheated planet — and too many newsrooms still are more inclined to cover today’s equivalent of dance competitions. The record heat waves and storms of 2020 confirmed what scientists have long predicted: climate change is underway and threatens unparalleled catastrophe. And because carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere for centuries, temperature rise and its effects are only getting started. As one scientist said as wildfires turned San Francisco’s skies orange last September, “We’re going to look back in 10 years, certainly 20 … and say, ‘Wow, 2020 was a crazy year, but I miss it.’”
A handful of major newspapers are paying attention. But most news coverage, especially on television, continues to underplay the climate story, regarding it as too complicated, or disheartening, or controversial. Last month, we asked the world’s press to commit to treating climate change as the emergency that scientists say it is; their response was dispiriting.
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This message is muted at best today, and the result is predictable. In the United States, only 26 percent of the public is “alarmed” about climate change, according to opinion polls analyzed by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communications (a member of the CCNow consortium). One reason why? Less than a quarter of the public hear about climate change in the media at least once a month.
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Read more: https://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/climate-emergency-statement.php
There is a reason news rooms don’t provide more coverage of the “climate crisis”. Most of the material which climate activists want newsrooms to print is not actually news.
“Glaciers to melt in 50 years” – does that get your heart racing? Glaciers melting next year would be far more interesting, but near term predictions carry significant risks. In 2019 Glacier National Park had to quietly remove their “Gone by 2020” signs, after the glaciers failed to melt on schedule.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes provides an excellent explanation of why climate news does not receive more attention;
Did anyone notice a few weeks ago, when a 1600 square mile iceberg broke off the Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica? Of course not. Big icebergs happen from time to time, they don’t affect anyone’s life to any significant degree. It is not likely this iceberg will show up anywhere interesting. What happens in the Antarctic tends to stay in the Antarctic.
Events which actually affect people’s daily lives, like efforts to pressure city politicians to actually do some of that road maintenance they keep promising, are far more relevant and interesting.
Hayes did point out that people’s interest in climate change jumps when other events occur, like when a big wildfire somewhere which threatens people’s homes. Big fires are an opportunity for activist journalists to slip in a few climate messages, because a major disaster is an opportunity to make climate change seem relevant. But the interest in climate change rapidly fades away after the fire is contained.
There is one aspect of the climate crisis which is consistently newsworthy, which WUWT will continue to highlight: all the politicians who seek to take advantage of people’s fear of climate change, to pass their economy wrecking big government boondoggles, and the scientists who provide cover for the politicians with their evidence lite models.
A rise in taxes or government deficits this year is far more important to most people, than a load of empty hype about events which might happen 50 years from now. Who cares about some big iceberg, when your job security is at risk?
From the article: “The record heat waves and storms of 2020 confirmed what scientists have long predicted: climate change is underway and threatens unparalleled catastrophe”
What record heat waves and storms?
These guys are living in a false climate change reality created for them by the likes of Michael Man and they have no clue they are not living in the real world.
And aren’t these the guys who are in charge of spreading the climate change propaganda far and wide? So are they dupes, or are they just using the climate change propaganda for personal gain?
Somebody ought to ask them to prove their claims of record heat waves and storms in 2020. If they believe that, they really are delusional.
Ed Murrow covered actual news. Climate change reporting is like reporting the astonishing news that language continually changes .. or that sports champions continually change … or that underwear gets continually changed.
If you learn a new word, like “woke” or “LBGTQ” (however that gets pronounced), that’s news to you, but everyone else who already know just sighs and says “duh!”.
If it’s your home town team or alma mater that wins a sports championship, that’s fantastic news to you and your fellow team fans, but nearly all other sports fans are only thinking about next year, and couldn’t care less how great you feel that your team won.
And if it’s your underwear that got changed, likely you’re feeling less, well, yucky … but if you mentioned that fact to anyone else, it’s well, “I wish you hadn’t shared that”.
Actually, climate reporting is more like covering the weather hopped up on steroids and shrooms. Weather is the new “climate”.
That was back when media oligopolies had a working business model that did not involve direct selling of news plants on a daily basis in place of ad buys. It’s totally different in today’s weaponized drone news drops and agenda wars.
“a load of empty hype about events which might happen 50 years from now”
Not “might” but “certainly won’t”.
This may be a slight generalisation, but do we actually have journalists and reporters in the old fashioned sense anymore?
Most articles seem to be cut and paste now with every paper or broadcaster carrying identical stories. It is as if there is a central distribution point for the “news today”
Further. Does anyone pay any attention to MSM these days? It has become so woke it fails to convey anything of interest anyway.
“The record heat waves and storms of 2020….”
Gee whiz, I watch the weather every day, including the night reporting and we didn’t even have a tornado event. Did have a derecho that caused some local damage, but nothing like the REAL disaster of the 1974 tornado swarm that started when three weather systems bumped into each other and went eastward into Ohio. Haven’t even had a good hurricane story lately. Nothing like Hurricane Sandy these days. Remember that one? Hurricane Andrew? Katrina?
So where were these ‘record heat waves and storms’ from last year? Is that ‘reporter’ on this planet, or is he searching for life on Mars?
The first population control project of the 20th century was conducted by the Kaiser in Namibia. Were there any reporters around?
It seems that climate activists are quick to blame any extreme weather event that affects a heavily-populated area on “global warming” or “climate change” (since nobody really knows what the climate will do in the future), but what about years where nothing dramatic happens to a given area?
For example, there was a major heat wave in western Europe during the summer of 2003, with high temperatures above 95 F (35 C) for several weeks in a row, but at the same time the weather was relatively cool and rainy along the east coast of the USA, with daily highs in the low 70’s (historical average high temperatures are in the 80’s in July and August). Along the east coast, crops that need sunshine were dismal that year, but those that sometimes need irrigation were thriving on all the rain. “Global warming” was all over the European news that year, but largely ignored by the major New York news networks.
Then came the summer of 2005, with four major hurricanes (including Katrina) striking the Gulf Coast, and enough named storms in the Atlantic to get into the Greek alphabet, so all the rage was why didn’t the Bush administration do something to prevent the hurricanes? Meanwhile, summer weather in Europe that year was relatively average, and no one there really complained.
But then 2006 through 2011 had relatively few Atlantic hurricanes, and people along the Gulf Coast bracing for another rough hurricane season were probably thankful for not having to evacuate their homes those years. Meanwhile, the Philippines and Japan were hit by monster typhoons, but who worries about Pacific typhoons in America or Europe? Not many people…
The news media thrive on “if it bleeds, it leads”–for some reason, some people have a morbid desire to read about suffering, and the news media want to incite people to “do something” about it. When it comes to natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornados, or floods, about the only thing that can be done is to evacuate the affected area during the storm and rebuild (and restore electric power) as quickly as possible after the storm has moved away.
But even during major weather events in localized areas, there are many other areas of the world experiencing pleasant weather, or at least weather that doesn’t interfere with people’s daily lives, so that “partly cloudy with a slight chance of showers” doesn’t really make news, so people go about their business and don’t worry about the weather.
Edward Murrow’s reporting on the Nazi invasion of Poland was crucial in showing an existential threat to the people of Poland, and by extension, most of eastern Europe (although the invasion of Austria had already occurred). A hurricane, tornado, flood, or wildfire can be a temporary existential threat to people in its path, but for people away from the storm, it’s difficult to convince them that not driving to the grocery store today *may* slightly lessen the impact of some storm 50 years in the future, when some of them may have returned to dust.
The Nazi invasion of Poland, as horrible as it was, did have an interesting consequence on a young aspiring actor in Polish theater named Karol Wojtyla, who decided to abandon the theater, and during World War II went into hiding and studied to become a priest. He later became the youngest Archbishop of Krakow, and in 1978 became one of the most influential Popes of the Catholic Church, and a leading figure in the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet domination.
Had he continued as an actor, he probably would have been unknown outside of Poland. Even the worst events in human history have a way of correcting themselves…
“The news media thrive on “if it bleeds, it leads”–for some reason, some people have a morbid desire to read about suffering, and the news media want to incite people to “do something” about it.”
Unfortunately, it’s not just the news media, people in very high places are intentionally feeding the fires, so to speak. People in the highest places . .
Actually, there are similarities between today’s agenda reporters and Charles Lindberg’s conduct and naivete toward Germany in the late 1930s. He was very much pro Germany and badly lacked the facts on what was happening there in addition to leading the push against U.S. involvement. He even failed to deliver the first letter to FDR from Einstein and the east European physicists warning of the potential for nuclear bomb development in Germany. And like Lindberg, they don’t really get full and lasting blame for their mistakes.