Just a few short months ago, most Americans had no idea what a Green New Deal was, with its name recognition polling in the single digits. Now, according to some new polling from the Green Advocacy Project, that’s flipped, with only 5% of voters saying they’ve heard “nothing at all” about it. Unfortunately, as David Roberts explains at Vox, the widespread recognition, particularly among Republicans, is because Fox News has blanketed the airwaves with ridiculously bad-faith partisan attacks that masquerade as news.
Other polling Roberts cites highlights the staunch difference in how Fox News viewers describe the plan (lots of “cow” and “plane” and “eliminate”) compared to people who don’t watch a channel that turns their brain into racist mush, and use words like “energy” and “plan” and “address” and “climate change”.
Although Fox was designed from the outset to be a right-wing propaganda factory rather than actual news organization, it drives public conversation and shapes legitimate reporting. The result, Roberts writes, is that because “mainstream political journalists have a 24-hour primal howl in one ear” in the form of Fox News while the left scolds itself, “naturally coverage starts to trend negative.” And at that point, because of the lies and lie-adjacent opinions on Fox News, a popular policy like the GND “has become ‘polarizing and ‘divisive.’ Right on cue, moderate Democrats recoil.”
Roberts uses this as an example of how media, particularly broadcast or TV news, fails to recognize that bad-faith actors exploit the asymmetry of the unified right and the broader but fractured left to warp media coverage of political issues in their favor. His answer is for the left to mobilize its base, forget about appeasing the other party, which has made it clear it has no mind to compromise, and recognize that building a coalition bigger than Fox News is the key to winning the climate fight.
How does that happen when cable news seems so determined to ignore climate change? As it happens, the cover story for this month’s issue of The Nation magazine is an impressive feature announcing a new project by journalist Mark Hertsgaard and Columbia Journalism Review’s editor in chief and publisher Kyle Pope.
The new #CoveringClimateNow project is designed to push journalists to, well, cover climate change, now. And not only cover it, but cover it well. As Hertsgaard and Pope explain at length in The Nation, media has traditionally been an easy target for organized denial’s tactics of false balance, and has treated climate policy stories as political horse races, focusing on reactions to a policy instead of explaining what the policy does and how people would be helped (or hurt) by its implementation.
Fortunately, they offer some tips from a forthcoming report on how journalists can tackle the issue more confidently. They suggest that reporters learn some of the basics of the science, and that they get out of the beltway mindset and spend more time in the heartland reporting on the stories surrounding Rush Limbaugh’s conservative audience.
There is another way, though. We may not like it, but what’s to stop a Bezos or Bloomberg from setting up their own liberal version of Fox News? In reporting on how conservative Sinclair Broadcasting is looking to expand, Eric Levitz at NYMag suggests, likely with tongue in cheek, that “If the left had a better class of ideological billionaires, “Here’s How Republicans Are Trying to Poison Your Children to Please Their Corporate Overlords This Week” segments would already be a staple of local TV news.”
And why shouldn’t it be?