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OMG The Media is Failing Us So Hard Right Now [1]
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Date: 2025-04-01
Lots of left-wing whining about the media (the “legacy media,” or the “MSM”) is based on the notion that the fourth estate is not pushing back very hard… on anything… right now. The days of robust muckraking journalism are behind us. The press will not call the current administration out on anything. Lazy softball questions are the norm. Billionaire owners of corporate media are quashing truth in favor of heavily doctored, cynical spin - and running only those features and editorials likeliest to gin up anger and generate clicks.
My beef with the media is focused mainly on the climate. And even I must admit that the MSM is reporting on climate change. The problem is that THEY AREN’T CALLING IT THAT. They do not frame news about flooding in Italy and Spain - hurricanes carving deadly swathes through the American south - wildfires ravaging Pacifica - baseball-sized hail in Nova Scotia - and so on - as anything other than “weather.”
Any news that the average consumer sees about the climate - topics that include immigration, flooding, massive droughts, existentially awful wildfire seasons, war and refugee issues, and weather disasters writ large - are framed entirely without larger context.
The MSM reports, but they do not help us see. They do not provide background. They cravenly will not assign “blame” or go further than calling events “once a century” or “unprecedented,” before adding a line about how a similarly catastrophic rainfall hit the same area in 1896, and without deigning to mention that yes, there was such a rainfall almost a century ago, but that catastrophic weather events of the same caliber have been happening more and more frequently in recent years. Which would lead to the inescapable conclusion that things are getting worse.
Oh no. That would be responsible - and possibly anger their corporate overlords.
While reports of gory and deadly events continue to be published (hey! deaths are juicy content for the click-happy media corporations) the quotidian pulse of climate-related incidents like floods and hurricanes and droughts and wildfires tends to be published as news that floats in no context. A flood here. A wildfire - or a season of wildfires - there. Drought in the Horn of Africa. A monster hurricane - or several - in the Gulf of Mexico.
These are all dutifully reported, but unless news outlets actually SAY THE WORDS “climate crisis” or “global warming,” and unless they take responsibility for connecting the dots between horrendous, out of control weather events and emissions, the MSM leaves an “average viewer” flummoxed and uninformed, and not putting together a fuller picture of what’s going on.
The news is out there, but it is mostly disguised, couched, or obfuscated.
As a rare example of reporting that does mention our changing climate, I direct you to the BBC, on March 14.
Florence and Pisa on alert as flooding hits Italy
Unusually for such a piece, the final three paragraphs mention the changing climate:
The devastating floods brought by Storm Boris were made worse by climate change, scientists at the World Weather Attribution group said. Europe is the fastest-warming continent - which not only brings much more frequent and intense heatwaves, but also more extreme rainfall. A hotter world means the atmosphere can hold more moisture, which can lead to heavier rainfall.
This, alas, is decidedly not the norm (thank you, BBC!).
Far more typical is this piece on AOL.com, where the editors ran the BBC reporting verbatim - except that they simply DELETED the final paragraphs, thus totally excising all mention of global warming:
There is also this effort from Yahoo.com, which is much shorter, and proffers no explanation at all about what might be behind these disasters.
Here’s a piece on CNN about the dreadful storms, hail, flooding, and tornadoes across the eastern seaboard in March. The word “climate” appears in the breadcrumbs at the top of the page, and in the URL, but NOWHERE in the article itself.
The “average reader” is not presented with even the slightest suggestion that the climate is changing across the globe, and with it, the weather - for the worse and more terrifyingly dangerous.
But the most common editorial decision in stories about climate-change-induced weather is perhaps even more damaging: framing the issue as something “scientists are still debating,” or about which they have reached some tentative conclusions “on which they cannot agree,” or are not able “to assign blame for any particular incident” on the climate.
This allows the reader to introduce doubt into the equation, and thus chalk the gist of the news up to “those scientists are always changing their minds” (in common with “first red meat was bad for you and now it’s good again, just like peanut butter”). It also allows the reader to cling to the notion that there really is a solid foundation for doubt and delay, as “the experts” themselves cannot agree about this stuff, or tell us with confidence how bad the situation actually is.
The human mind, of course, needs only the slimmest of pretexts on which to deny or avoid thinking about something worrying. Heck, we can deny reality based on no evidence at all (and mounds of it to the contrary, viz., “Donald Trump is a very good businessman”) so it’s no wonder that so many folks shove the changing climate off to the side and do not consider it as an imminent danger - or even reality.
And to be scrupulously fair, much of the commonly available reporting in the US doesn’t present it as such! Emissions and warming and the climate are not mentioned… or are presented parenthetically, far down past the point where 90% of readers have stopped scrolling… or the information is larded with so many caveats and “just asking questions” tropes that it is easy to dismiss the changing climate as nothing more than a minor elite scientific debate of no particular urgency.
I realize that we are struggling with so much right now. Here in the USA we’re staring down the barrel of no more social safety net, no more public education, no more beautiful pristine national parks, no more due process, no more free speech, and NO MORE BLEEDIN’ DEMOCRACY.
This is more than “a lot.” This feels like the whole ballgame.
But it is not, in the final analysis, the whole ballgame.
The whole ballgame is our physical survival on this planet. The whole ballgame is the ultimate degradation of the biosphere that hatched and cradled us. The whole ballgame is losing the nurturing, human-friendly habitats in which we thrived over the past millennia. The whole ballgame is the fucking climate, in which everything on Earth is subsumed.
If we think we only have enough bandwidth right now to work on resisting the chainsaw that is being taken to our government, perhaps we’re wrong. Perhaps we have just enough attention left over to consider how we might let the giant media conglomerates know that we see their irresponsibility and fealty to the overlords’ bottom line.
We want more reporting, and we want it to be honest. We want the truth. We want the citizens of Earth to know what’s coming, and why. And we want people to have a chance to make a decision to save themselves - to act locally, if all help of federal change is gone - and dig in for survival as the winds howl and the fires rage and fist-sized hail rains down on the car soup that our waterways have become.
A broad can dream, right?
Thanks for reading! I have a Substack, too: Climate Revolution Now
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