Promoting ‘climate crisis’: New message strategy of climate alarmists
Credit to Author: YEN MAKABENTA| Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2019 17:00:05 +0000
First word
SPREADING the word about human-caused global warming and scaring the world with climate catastrophe used to be enough messaging insofar as the climate alarmists, including the United Nations (UN), were concerned.
This month, with the forthcoming UN climate action summit in New York coming up on September 23, the climate alarmists have realized that their message strategy is not enough. They have to turn the messaging up a notch.
They have decided to highlight “climate crisis” as the principal message and theme in their propaganda. And they have picked the media as a special sector of concern.
The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) started things rolling last April when it launched Covering Climate Now, a project to strengthen media’s focus on climate change. Last week, CJR said 170 US and international news outlets have signed on with Covering Climate Now.
Media organizations joining the initiative agreed to run “a week’s worth of climate coverage in the lead-up to the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York on September 23,” according to CJR.
Seven-hour CNN marathon
Evidently, more have joined the initiative.
According to the Washington Times, CNN is one of nearly 200 news outlets that have vowed to increase their coverage of the “climate crisis.”
On Wednesday, September 4, CNN aired an “unprecedented prime-time event on the climate crisis,” a seven-hour marathon featuring 10 of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidates, who took questions early on from activists and climate-woke audience members, with nary a skeptic in sight.
“We have 11 years to avoid the catastrophic consequences of this crisis. Food shortages. Rising sea levels.
More extreme weather events like Hurricane Dorian,’” said CNN host Wolf Blitzer at the town hall.
The CNN marathon proved to be a ratings flop, however. According to Nielsen, CNN came out a poor third to Fox News and MSNBC.
The 10 democratic candidates could not agree in their views of the climate problem.
Fault lines opened on issues like the future of fossil fuels, fracking, nuclear energy and the Senate filibuster, suggesting a debate on these differences should be at the forefront of the nomination process, not relegated to a sidebar.
On fracking, Senators Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris called for total bans on the natural gas extraction process, while former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Amy Klobucharmade vague promises to review the safety of existing wells.
The back-to-back forums, which went on until midnight, highlighted the complexity of overhauling the entire global economy and added heft to activists’ calls for a full-on debate on the climate crisis.
The forum came less than two weeks after the Democratic National Committee rejected party activists’ efforts to get an official, sanctioned climate debate. Some suspect that party leaders’ reluctance to have a debate is because they fear candidates’ differences on issues like fracking might expose fissures that undermine the goal of defeating President Donald Trump, particularly in gas-rich battleground states like Pennsylvania.
Concerns about media objectivity
The “climate crisis” initiative has provoked serious criticism, principally this:
“Placing more emphasis on climate reporting is one thing, but by embracing the ‘climate crisis’ label pushed by global-warming activists, critics worry that the media outlets have taken sides on a complex, contentious issue, abandoning any pretense of balanced or neutral coverage.”
Jim Lakely, spokesman of the Heartland Institute, declared in a statement:
“The fact that the Columbia Journalism Review has joined forces with far-leftist publications The Guardian and The Nation to propagandize a phony climate panic tells you all you need to know about the sad and hopelessly biased state of legacy media outlets today.”
Kelly McBride, senior vice president at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, defended the project as well as the “climate crisis” tag, saying “a majority of scientists would say it’s a crisis.”
“I think a lot of journalists have shifted from viewing the climate issue as one that is disputed to one that is affecting different communities in different ways,” she said. “So, rather than reporting on whether climate change is happening, they are reporting on the actual impact.”
All reputable climate scientists, even those dismissed as “deniers,” believe that the rise in atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels, driven by human-caused emissions, has had an impact on the earth’s climate, but that’s a far cry from declaring the planet is in crisis.
Roy Spencer, a University of Alabama in Huntsville climate scientist formerly with NASA, has called the “crisis” label a “gross exaggeration.”
“To use a term like ‘crisis’ when discussing climate change is a gross exaggeration, especially for journalists,” said Mr. Spencer, author of Inevitable Disaster: Why Hurricanes Can’t Be Blamed on Global Warming. “There is no aspect of climate change which is of ‘crisis’ proportions.”
Reframing coverage of climate change
CJR’s Covering Climate Now aims at “reframing the way journalists cover climate change” at a time when “civilization is accelerating toward disaster.”
“The media are complacent while the world burns,” declared CJR in an April 22 headline accompanied by a wildfire photo.
NASA, however, found that the area burned by global wildfires dropped by 25 percent from 2003-2019, raising the question: What happens to stories that run counter to the “climate crisis” narrative, already under-reported by mainstream media outlets?
Climate skeptic Marc Morano, who runs the Climate Depot website, called the journalism initiative “totally unnecessary,” given that the media are “already doing the most crappy reporting they could possibly do.”
“This latest attempt basically says, ‘Keep up more of the same crappy reporting,’” said Mr. Morano. “No dissent. No debate. Let’s promote the UN line, let’s promote the UN claims, let’s promote the idea that the government can control the climate.”
Tim Graham, vice president for media analysis at the conservative Media Research Center, accused the news industry of attempting to snuff debate on climate science and policy.
“The media elites are not only goaded by the Left to see climate change as the overriding story of our lives, but they are goaded to make sure democracy dies in darkness,” said Mr. Graham.
Discouraging a ‘both sides’ approach
CJR’s Emily Tamkin actually discouraged CNN from adopting a “both sides” approach to the climate story, saying “the moderators should operate on the assumption that the climate is in crisis and that this needs to be addressed.”
Covering Climate Now comes after years of environmental groups urging media outlets to devote more coverage to climate change, a campaign that drew headlines after MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted in July 2018 that climate was “a palpable ratings killer.”
Liberal foundations have been eager to fund climate journalism. The CJR initiative reported receiving $1 million from Bill Moyers, president of the left-tilting Schumann Media Center, which also funds The Nation Institute and Democracy Now, according to InfluenceWatch.
The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which publishes CJR, has come under scrutiny in recent years for its Energy and Environmental Reporting Project, which is funded in part by Democratic mega donor George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and several Rockefeller charities, known for their climate advocacy.
The industry group Energy in Depth accused Columbia of “paid-for journalism” over the project’s 2017 article in the Los Angeles Times blaming the Exxon Valdez spill on climate change. Two years earlier, an
“Exxon Knew” article failed to disclose the project’s funders, which the Times later added.
The Times said that the reporting was not influenced by its funders, although Rockefeller Family Fund president Lew Wasserman said in 2016 that “we paid a team of independent reporters” from Columbia “to try to determine what Exxon and other US oil companies had really known about climate science, and when.”
The questions being raised about media objectivity in the face of calls for ‘climate crisis journalism’ are serious.
They test how seriously or how lightly a media organization takes its responsibility and its mission in society.
yenmakabenta@yahoo.com