Break The ‘Climate Silence’ – The Media Must Bring Back Its COVID-style Coverage
The climate emergency isn’t a myth but an inescapable tragedy.
While pop star Billie Eilish sings about hills burning in California, ‘Don’t Look Up’ spent weeks on Netflix as the most-streamed movie ever. Climate fiction has become a popular genre, with multiple books on the crisis turning into bestsellers.
However, it appears journalism has failed to shine an optimum light on the most urgent story of our time. Despite our living through the hottest summer in history, as well as dozens of extreme and unprecedented weather events, climate crisis remains a niche concern for most outlets.
Covering Climate Now – A Notable Exception
In the US, most TV coverage of this summer’s brutal weather didn’t even highlight the words “climate change” or “climate crisis“, much less explain the burning of fossil fuels is what’s driving that hellish weather. There are a few notable exceptions, however.
Co-founded by The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review and the Guardian, Covering Climate Now is a global journalism collaboration committed to improving coverage of climate change worldwide. It has been helping break the media’s “climate silence”.
While the concerning silence has long prevailed in the industry, it began to break in 2019 and has been seeing encouraging success since. For instance, major outlets in the US now treat the climate emergency as a subject to cover every day and not solely as a weather story.
Media Must Take Climate Coverage Seriously
The broad, general public needs to understand what is happening, why it matters and, above all, they can fix it – by voting for the right person, by talking about the crisis and by not buying unsustainable products. Journalists must recollect how they covered COVID-19.
Most media outlets ran multiple stories on the pandemic every day, helping even casual news consumers understand that something important was happening. COVID was covered as a health story, a politics story, a business, education and lifestyle story.
Also Read : Climate Crisis: Current Extinction Rates Are 35 Times Higher
Above all, the coverage also included solutions to the crisis, such as vaccinations.
