Journalism, Propaganda and Climate Change

Recently I was on a Zoom call with a philanthropic advisor who toward the end of our conversation asked me an open-ended question: What do you think is missing from climate communications today? He regarded journalism to be a branch of communications—perhaps I didn’t agree with that characterization, he wondered?

For context he provided a quick review of communications strategies that have failed to move enough voters to action over recent decades. First came the notion of scaring people, his example being Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”; that gave way to the notion of providing the public with sober, high-quality information, but a knowledge deficit proved not to be the problem either; and so now the prevailing wisdom has become to give people hope, which is why philanthropic support is flowing into solutions journalism, he said.

In his brief survey, he didn’t mention a large part of the problem—that since the 1980s, climate science has been up against formidable opposition. The oil industry and its fellow travelers, aiming to preserve the economic supremacy of carbon energy, have poured more than a billion dollars into erecting a powerful infrastructure of misinformation. They have built a false climate narrative to discredit the scientific consensus, abetted by the parallel ascension of Fox News.