“Covering Climate Now” has debuted. It’s a project co-sponsored by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation to which other media and journalists are being invited. The objective is simple: Bring together journalists and news venues to improve—“dramatically improve,” according to The Nation—coverage of the climate crisis and solutions to it. Here are some details about the project and an email address to reach the organizers. At CJR, Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope write:
We see ourselves as convening and informing a conversation that journalists need to have, with each other and the public we serve, about how to do justice to the climate story at this decisive historic moment. To succeed, we need the participation and energy of as many journalists and news outlets as possible. We also need to hear from a wide range of stakeholders—scientists, advocates, government and business officials, and private citizens—about how we can do a better job of making clear what is happening, why, and what can be done about it.
We aim to bring journalists together face to face—as we did at a conference at the Columbia Journalism School in April that launched this effort, and in additional gatherings planned across the United States and abroad—and online, via a new vertical housed on the websites of CJR and The Nation. In these and other venues, we hope that journalists and others will talk about, report on, analyze, and debate how news outlets should cover the rapidly uncoiling climate crisis and its solutions.
We want to highlight the good coverage that’s being done (there’s lots of it) and find ways to encourage more of it. We want to figure out how to persuade newsroom managers that covering the climate crisis is our journalistic responsibility and also need not lose money. (The data may surprise you.) Given the current economics of journalism, we know the answer can’t require tons more newsroom resources. It can, though, involve smarter use of the resources we have, as well as integrating the climate story into everything we do.
We want to share ways of telling the climate story that draw in viewers and readers and empower them to take action. We’re as much about solutions to the problem as we are about detailing the problem itself. Above all, we want to break the climate silence that still pervades too much of the news media.
Bill Moyers, a veteran octogenarian journalist who has retired a couple of times, but keeps coming back, gave the keynote at the “Covering Climate Today” symposium April 30:
[...] Many of us have recognized that our coverage of global warming has fallen short. There’s been some excellent reporting by independent journalists and by enterprising reporters and photographers from legacy newspapers and other news outlets. But the Goliaths of the US news media, those with the biggest amplifiers—the corporate broadcast networks—have been shamelessly AWOL, despite their extraordinary profits. The combined coverage of climate change by the three major networks and Fox fell from just 260 minutes in 2017 to a mere 142 minutes in 20l8—a drop of 45 percent, reported the watchdog group Media Matters.
Meanwhile, about 1,300 communities across the United States have totally lost news coverage, many from newspaper mergers and closures, according to the University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism. Hundreds of others are still standing only as “ghost newspapers.” They no longer have resources for even local reporting, much less for climate change. “Online news sites, as well as some TV newsrooms, are working hard to keep local reporting alive, but these are taking root far more slowly than newspapers are dying,” observes Tom Stites of Poynter in a report about the study. And, alas, many of the news outlets that are still around have ignored or misreported the climate story and failed to counter the tsunami of deceptive propaganda unleashed by fossil-fuel companies and the mercenaries, ideologues, and politicians who do their bidding. [...]
You can read the rest of his speech at the link above, or watch this brief snippet below:
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try. For one thing we know beyond all doubt: Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’”
~~Eleanor Roosevelt, Voice of America, November 11, 1951
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2005—Karzai Shoots Back:
After being the subject of a critical story emanating from Washington regarding the drug trade in Afghanistan, Afghani President Hamid Karzai shot back:
President Hamid Karzai today demanded justice for Afghan prisoner abuse by American interrogators, and he blamed the United States and Britain, not his government, for the slow progress of anti-drug efforts in his country. He also said he would ask President Bush for greater control over Afghan affairs as part of a longer-term strategic partnership.
. . . Mr. Karzai underscored cooperation with the United States, but also insisted that Afghans' sense of independence and self-reliance was growing. "No Afghan is a puppet, you know," he said in a Fox News interview. "There is a stronger ownership of the Afghan government and the Afghan people now."
It remained unclear how much his criticisms were intended for Afghan consumption, or whether his meeting with Mr. Bush might be rendered less comfortable than past such encounters, which have generally been portrayed as relaxed and amicable.
His comments, nonetheless, came at a delicate and unexpectedly contentious moment, a day after Mr. Karzai had expressed dismay over reports of abuses of Afghan prisoners - "it has shocked me thoroughly," he said Saturday in Kabul - and as Mr. Karzai's help in eradicating opium poppies in Afghanistan was being questioned by the United States.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Ben Carson stepped in it yesterday, and it’s all on tape. The i-word parade gathers steam. Greg Dworkin parses polling data. IRS memo says Trumpsters are wrong on the tax returns, which we knew. Bridgegate is back! Godwin's Law finally repealed.