Making climate the story of everything – The Nation

The climate crisis has become inescapable in much of what we see, hear and read. Don’t look for spent weeks as the most streamed movie ever on Netflix. Pop star Billie Eilish sings about the burning hills in California. In bookstores, climate fiction has become a genre in its own right, while that of Jeff Goodell The heat will kill you firsta poignant non-fiction tale of what life on a warming planet will mean, enters its second month on the New York Times bestseller list.

And where is the journalism in all this? Despite the hottest summer in history, wildfires, tropical storms and rapidly warming oceans, the media continues to be outmatched by popular culture when it comes to telling the story. most urgent of our time. Inexplicably, climate change remains a niche concern for most mainstream media. Most U.S. TV reports on this summer’s hellish weather haven’t even mentioned the words “climate change,” let alone explained that the burning of oil, gas, and coal is causing this hellish weather. . Too many newsrooms continue to consider the climate as a compartmentalized matter for specialists.

There are, of course, notable exceptions. The Guardian, for example, has long provided comprehensive and extensive science-based coverage of the climate crisis and its solutions, as have other major global media outlets such as the AFP news agency and Al Jazeera. But these outlets, as excellent as they often are, are among the outliers; Much of the rest of the media, particularly television which, even in today’s digital age, remains the primary source of global news for the greatest number of people, is struggling to find its place on the climate plan.

We wish it were otherwise. As founders of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration created to break the “climate silence” that has long prevailed in the media, we strive to help our colleagues in the news industry step up their coverage of climate change. climate history.

In 2019, the media silence on climate began to break, and over the past four years we have seen some encouraging successes: in the United States, major media outlets including The Washington Post are now treating climate change as a daily topic and not just a weather story. Telemundo 51, a Spanish-language television station based in Miami, pursues an “all-newsroom” approach that encourages journalists at all times to talk about climate change, including its solutions. Abroad, France Télévisions (the French counterpart to the British BBC) has abandoned traditional weather bulletins in favor of a daily “weather-climate bulletin”, where viewers can track global warming in real time using a eight-digit electronic meter indicating how much current temperatures exceed current temperatures. pre-industrial average. (As of September 12, the temperature was 1.19829708 degrees Celsius.)

These revolutionary innovations are remarkable, but they remain exceptions. Dramatic changes in climate have made increased media coverage of extreme weather conditions inevitable. But explain the climate connection to extreme weather conditions is a different task. Media coverage needs to start systematically highlighting the connections between climate change and decisions by industry and government that have overheated the planet.

As journalists, we must do better. The general public needs to understand what is happening, why it is important and, above all, know that they can help to fix it, for example by voting, not buying unsustainable products and talking to friends and family of the need to do what is necessary. even.

Journalism is at its best when it effectively explains and connects the dots between seemingly disparate events. This means, for example, learning lessons from the way the media has covered Covid – a sprawling and complex story driven by science. No one in the media has debated the need to devote resources to helping the public understand Covid and then playing the story big. Most media outlets published several articles about Covid each day, which helped even casual news consumers understand that something important was happening. Journalists based our coverage on science, but we didn’t confine it to the science desk: we covered Covid as a health story, a political story, a business story, an education story, and a lifestyle story . And we talked not only about the problem but also about its solutions (e.g., masking, social distancing, vaccinations).

Climate coverage could take the same approach. Every newsroom in every community must view climate change not as a beat but as a throughline involving everything we do. No corner of the editorial staff is safe – neither the business world, nor that of culture, nor that of sports or that of town hall.

At the national level, journalism must figure out how to place climate change at the heart of its political coverage. Next year, elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Egypt will have profound implications for the prospects for global climate action. Can Political Journalists and Editors Cut Their Spending? their fixation on horse racing coverage and instead provide the kind of coverage voters need to make informed choices? Election coverage should help the public understand what candidates will do TO DO on the climate crisis if they are elected, not just on what they say. He should hold candidates accountable, not by asking (as Fox did during the first US Republican debate last month) whether they believe in climate change, but rather by asking: “What is your plan to achieve it? deal with the climate crisis?