Op-Ed: Mainstream Media Sources that Promoted Climate Crisis Propaganda

PORTSMOUTH, OH – This column highlights the climate crisis hoax rhetoric promoted by the media and helps explain how the public is inundated with the carbon emissions ruse.  

“A New Commitment to Covering the Climate Story” is the title of a July 26, 2019, article by Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope for the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR). Hertsgaard is Covering Climate Now’s executive director and co-founder, and the environment correspondent of The Nation. Pope is the editor and publisher of Columbia Journalism Review, and a co-founder of Covering Climate Now. 

It’s now 2022. Therefore, mainstream media joined forces and revered up the airways by blitzing and barraging the public in 2019.  

A propaganda project co-founded by The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review, and The Guardian provided climate rhetoric for journalists and “all news outlets—big and small, digital and print, TV and radio, US-based and abroad—can do justice to the defining story of our time.” 

The article lists the media outlets they targeted. However, let me say that journalists and reporters are experts at investigating news stories; therefore, they know if global warming is true or false; they know whether carbon emission is destroying the planet and people or not; and they know a skunk stinks no matter what you name it. 

Excerpts:  

More than 60 outlets have signed on so far, with more on the way. There are TV networks (CBS News) and local TV stations; major newspapers in the US (The Philadelphia Inquirer, Minneapolis Star Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times) and abroad (Asahi Shimbun and la Repubblica, the biggest newspapers in Japan and Italy, respectively); eminent specialist publications (Nature, Scientific American, InsideClimate News, Harvard Business Review); distinguished digital publications (HuffPost, Vox, The Intercept, Slate); regional outlets (The Texas Observer, Colorado Springs Gazette); public radio stations (in New York City; Washington, DC; Chicago; Philadelphia; Boston; New Orleans; Louisville; and San Francisco) and public-radio programs (Marketplace, Science Friday, The World); popular magazines (Maclean’s of Canada, Newsweek Japan); leading individual and institutional voices (author Bill McKibben; the radio and TV program Democracy Now!; Channel 4 UK correspondent Alex Thomson; veteran TV meteorologists Dan Satterfield, Mike Nelson, and Paul Gross); and many more. 

At the website you can find 50 named newspapers/magazines, 20 TV/radio stations, 12 independent journalists, and 4 institutions that promoted the climate crisis propaganda in 2019. Did they know it was a hoax? 

“Each of these outlets has committed to running one week of focused climate coverage, to begin September 16 and culminate September 23, the day of the landmark international Climate Action Summit hosted by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in New York.”  

The following excerpt is one of the major hyped climate fearmongering statements:  

“In a report last October, scientists with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that humanity had just 12 years to slash heat-trapping emissions in half or else face catastrophic temperature rise and the record-breaking extreme weather it unleashes.” 

And guess what? Humans, animals, and plants have not melted from the blistering heat nor have they been annihilated by scorching temperatures. Weather patterns such as heat waves as well as cold waves have been a part of the cycle of nature since the beginning of the beginning. Moreover, global warming is a sham.  

“Transforming the media’s coverage of the climate crisis” is the title of a May 22, 2019 article by the same authors. “CJR and The Nation are leading this effort, along with partners such as The Guardian and others yet to be announced. On behalf of the Schumann Media Center, Bill Moyers pledged $1 million to support the initiative for its first year.” 

“We can only do these things if a critical mass of journalists and news outlets come together to talk about how to make them happen, and if our work is informed by engagement with everyone who cares about this problem.” 

Dictators know they need ‘a critical mass of journalists’ to spread propaganda.  

On April 30, 2019, “The Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation assembled some of the world’s top journalists, scientists, and climate experts to devise a new playbook for journalism that’s compatible with the 1.5-degree future that scientists say must be achieved. We also held a town hall meeting on the coverage of climate change and the launch of an unprecedented, coordinated effort to change the media conversation.”

‘Unprecedented’ is the word used in the above paragraph.  

“The media are complacent while the world burns” is the title of an April 22, 2019, article by the same authors. “Yet at a time when civilization is accelerating toward disaster, climate silence continues to reign across the bulk of the US news media.” 

People and planet are still intact in 2022. But is climate fearmongering working?  

“Instead of sleepwalking us toward disaster, the US news media need to remember their Paul Revere responsibilities—to awaken, inform, and rouse the people to action…This journalistic failure has given rise to a calamitous public ignorance, which in turn has enabled politicians and corporations to avoid action,” asserted Hertsgaard and Pope. 

Blame and shame the media outlets until they promote your propaganda. Who owns the media? So, the media is a failure if the public doesn’t buy into the climate hoax. 

“And even if journalists can figure out a new climate-coverage playbook, can they surmount the widespread public distrust of the press…” 

This is why the public does not trust the mainstream press. Our First Amendment is being eroded and Freedom of the Press is going down the rabbit hole. Stop lying to us.

The Washington Post and The New York Times is also mentioned and of course, these two pompous and poisonous publications are at the top of the propaganda power pyramid.  

Do local TV weathercasters believe the climate crisis hoax and promote it? Do they belief CO2 is destroying civilization? “Some of the best media coverage of climate change has come from local TV weathercasters, who are increasingly using their expertise to educate audiences about the science and what it means for their communities.”

Apparently, the climate czars want local media to propel the carbon emission ruse front and center because “the American news media’s center of gravity remains the television networks and their local affiliates.” 

The phrase of global warming was changed to climate change wording because the globe is not warming. Climate change is a more palatable buzzword.  

“As a result, the Green New Deal’s critics—notably Trump and congressional Republicans—have been able to act as if that scientific imperative doesn’t exist.” 

Precisely! President Donald Trump knew Green Utopia was a smoke and mirrors deal. The world is not being destroyed by CO2. People do not have to kill cows and eat bugs. The planet will not freeze or burn to a crispy crust from using fossil fuels. 

The following paragraph is where Hertsgaard and Pope get down and dirty by blaming conservatives for not buying into the climate hoax: 

“Instead, climate deniers are still given respectful treatment by US news outlets across the ideological spectrum. The companies that funded the disinformation, the Republicans (plus a handful of Democrats) who carried their water on Capitol Hill, and the right-wing media machine that injected their lies into the public consciousness continue to be treated as legitimate participants in the debate. But these entities in fact deserve to have their social licenses revoked, just as tobacco companies did. More than anyone else, it is climate deniers who got us into this mess; they don’t get to decide what we do about it now.” 

Hmmm. So, it’s the fault of the climate deniers. And they deserve to be disrespected by the media and barred by business. Really?  

“The climate crisis is a crime that should be prosecuted,” wrote Hertsgaard in a 2020 article for The Guardian. “Every person on Earth today is living in a crime scene. This crime has been going on for decades…This crime threatens today’s young people most of all and calls into question the very survival of civilization.” 

Hello. Humans are still alive and well on Earth. And so are polar bears.

There is no climate emergency. And 500 experts penned a letter to the United Nations in 2019. The letter was ignored.  

Google Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope, and you’ll find various articles where they have spread their bogus bunkum.  

Hertsgaard and Pope appear to be hopping mad and want to take their ball and go home to pout. Argh. How dare anyone disagree with their views on global warming and human extinction!