Last week we mentioned the extraordinary announcement by AP that it was taking a large sum of money to skew its climate coverage in an alarmist direction. It wasn’t phrased that way, of course, but it didn’t need to be. But this week Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore reminds us that it didn’t actually matter very much because of how many mainstream media outlets are already proudly and publicly committed to slanted reporting. Just what we need with a geopolitical crisis erupting that is due in part to daffy policy driven by misrepresented science.
Moore’s tweet provides a link worth checking out. Before you click it, if you didn’t already, we invite you to make a list of news organizations you trust. Or suspect other people trust. Or have heard of. Now click the link. It’s to “Covering Climate Now” and it includes news agencies including Agence France-Presse which to our lasting smugness Fact Checked us for printing true things that might cause unacceptable views. Also Bloomberg, Reuters, Getty Images and Pacnews. So AP is scrambling to catch up.
Now let’s list the “Television & Multimedia”. Well, ABC, CBS, “Cheddar” (not comic relief or cheese, it’s a thing), NBC, MSNBC, two PBS programs, The Weather Channel (but you guessed), The Weather Network (ditto), NHK and so on and so forth. Under “Radio & Podcasts” not Joe Rogan. But “Women’s Spaces, on KBBF” as well as the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, Crooked Media (but we repeat ourselves) and dozens of newspapers from the Christian Science Monitor (which on founding principles should surely think climate isn’t real) to the Nome Nugget, The Dhaka Tribune, the New Zealand Herald and Iklim Gazetesi and The Times of India. And bear in mind that a great many papers subscribe to the wire services so they’re in whether they say so or not.
If we wanted to list all the magazines we’d need a bigger newsletter. And the institutions. Oh my. Princeton. Boston University. The Concordia University, Department of Journalism.
To be fair, a lot are not on the list, including ones we kind of suspected would be. But the fact that they’re not officially affiliated with this particular group of people committed to breaking the Globe & Mail’s rule about giving both sides (and no, the Globe itself is not part of Covering Climate Now) doesn’t mean they aren’t equally committed to the goal itself.
So let’s be clear what that goal is, from their own website: “CCNow collaborates with journalists and newsrooms to produce more informed and urgent climate stories, to make climate a part of every beat in the newsroom — from politics and weather to business and culture — and to drive a public conversation that creates an engaged public.”
More urgent climate stories, intruding on every imaginable news story, to get the public on board with the campaign to shut down our energy industries and hope it’s OK in the morning.
It won’t be.
The American financial institution, Chase Bank, is advertising its services in the UK, but has a comforting Scottish brogue in the voice-over that makes 'Chase' sound like 'Cheese', so Cheese Bank. Not 'Cheddar' (a place in Zomerset), just 'Cheese'...