Less than a month ago, the world’s leading climate scientists issued a stark warning: the world is hurtling towards a future where increasingly common and severe fires, droughts and floods threaten our existence. Our only option to reverse the trajectory, the IPCC sixth assessment report’s authors wrote, was to take drastic climate action.
Viewed through that lens, News Corp’s promise to briefly campaign for an unambitious target of net zero emissions by 2050 is a commitment to lock the world into 1.5 degrees of warming and all the horrors that would entail.
Far from being a shift from the company’s traditional opposition to climate action, this campaign is further proof that Rupert Murdoch’s empire doesn’t believe the science about the world’s transformation — or doesn’t care.
On Monday morning, Nine papers reported that News Corp’s metro papers and news channel Sky News Australia would launch a “company-wide campaign promoting the benefits of a carbon-neutral economy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in Glasgow later this year”. The target, even if taken up, would leave the federal government lagging behind the US and UK and drag it in line with many banks, insurers and other companies.
This report comes as a Senate inquiry into media diversity holds a hearing on Sky News Australia’s suspension from YouTube.
The details of the campaign show it is even smaller than it first appears. News Corp papers and Sky will campaign for two weeks in October. The Australian will be excluded from the campaign, and “dissenting voices” — a euphemism for the staunchest climate change denialists who inhabit many of its top perches — will be expected to “reframe” their arguments. (It remains to be seen how figures such as Rowan Dean will reframe their complete denial of man-made climate change.) Sky’s participation will be limited to a documentary exploring the idea of net zero carbon emissions.
The choice of Joe Hildebrand as the face of the campaign provides some insight into the direction of the campaign, says writer and consultant Ketan Joshi.
“His previous work on climate change does exactly what a centre-right campaign like this would be best at: decrying both sides as ‘hysterical’ while failing to propose anything meaningful or substantial,” he wrote in RenewEconomy.
During the bushfires of December 2019, the News Corp columnist warned against discussing climate change in the midst of a climate emergency. While Australians were fleeing for their lives, Hildebrand argued that they shouldn’t have to concede much to battle climate change: “We need to find an economic path for Australia that can give working people the same quality of life — or just the capacity to survive day to day — that our abundance of fossil fuels currently offers.”
The announcement also makes clear that when it comes to climate change News Corp continues to act as more of a player than an impartial observer.
Nine’s Zoe Samios and Rob Harris report that its management briefed the government about the campaign, much like how a government would usually brief a publication about its campaign.
In the inquiry hearing on Monday morning, Sky News’ CEO Paul Whittaker defiantly claimed that News Corp accepts the science: “We don’t deny climate change. The question is what is the solution, and what is the cost?”
The world’s top experts say the solution is immediate action — and the cost is less than the cost of inaction. Anything less — like News Corp’s campaign — is denying the science of how our climate is changing for the worse.
Editors note: this piece has been updated to remove a statement implying that Nine’s reporting on News Corp’s campaign was timed to coincide with the Senate hearing on Monday.
Pretty much straight from the tobacco industry playbook, deny the science then, when that fails, muddy it, resist solutions, seek limitations on action and impossible evaluation criteria for anything proposed. When change becomes inevitable, say you will be part of the solution and then seek to derail it or slow it down from the inside. The only thing a bit different is that what appears to drive Newscorp, is a commitment/business model based on stoking negative emotions for profit and power and a visceral addiction to finding and attacking “enemies”. But all of this is just propaganda in the best traditions of a 1984 dictatorship (so yes it is behaving like a sort of state) and nothing to with journalism.
Agree, very familiar modus operandi lifted e.g. delaying tactics, straight from the US ‘architecture’ of influence in Koch’s ‘bill mill’ ALEC American Legislative Exchange Council one/the fulcrum of ‘owning’ the GOP and the legislature, supported by corporate donors to deny science of tobacco, climate etc. through ‘research’, PR, astroturfing, lobbying and spin by media, Fox especially, and ‘model bills’ (or as often, ignoring key policy issues); of late it has been more about gerrymandering, voter suppression etc. while still demanding taxes and public services to be nobbled….
There has been a veritable conga line of unknown but influential Americans involved with ALEC, including founded Paul Weyrich (littering the world with right wing think tanks, known for Heritage too), Lewis Powell (US CofC and Supreme Court), James Buchanan (Nobel Prize winner, Austrian/Chicago schools and radical right libertarian economist behind Rand, Friedman et al.), John Tanton (ZPG, admirer of white Oz, Bannon’s muse and anti-immigration network in Trump’s White House), et al., and more recent years a senior correspondent for an Australian media group was also listed.
Related, one is quite curious of how the ‘farmers” party the Nationals behave e.g. lobbying or putting internal pressure on the Libs regarding climate science, water, fossil fuels etc., now with the return of Barnaby Joyce to prosecute the case on climate science and net carbon zero etc. through media; sure that will produce immediate results?
There’s a substantial difference. The dangers of smoking only affected those who adopted the habit. Insufficient response to global warming (what the real problem always has been) wipes out entire species inclusive of humanity.
I should have said “predominantly only affected”
I am honestly in despair at the destruction NewsCorpse is wreaking on public discourse in this country. I have relatives that regularly read their garbage and then proceed to rant at family gatherings about culture war rubbish straight out of the front pages of The Australian. Even family members who are very accepting and supportive of LGB people are buying into trans panic hysteria about “men” in women’s bathrooms because they get most of their news from this shameless rabble of “journalists”. Then there were the months of arguments I had to have about the veracity of the “african gangs” problem in Melbourne, and the list goes on. Now, of course it’s ok for people to have different opinions than myself. But when their picture of reality is completely distorted by vendetta-led, inaccurate, and at times outright maliciously false reporting, the well is so poisoned when it comes to the underlying facts, it becomes impossible to even discuss the issues because we’re operating in two totally different realities of information. And that’s not even to mention their climate change denialism, as this article discusses so well, for which we will all pay a serious price in the decades to come.
I seriously worry that we are sliding down the same path as the US.
Of equal worry is what ‘The Australian’ elects not to report. I am constantly perplexed by Oz subscribers’ lack of knowledge on certain matters.
Having browsed a neighbour’s copy a couple weeks ago there was no mention of Angus Taylor’s proposed carbon tax to fund fossil fuel producers nor anything about the Surveillance Legislation Amendment Bill 2021 increasing powers of the AFP & ACIC to modify, add or delete data. However, on almost every page there was an article on how vital it is to open up borders despite Covid. Malcolm Turnbull’s description of The Australian as ‘pure propaganda’ is spot on.
Exactly right, Zut. It is not just the Murdoch media’s “vendetta-led, inaccurate and at times outright maliciously false reporting” (excellent summation Good Bird, though I’d add “coupled with overt bias towards the LNP”), that poisons the well of information and ideas so crucial to a healthy democracy. It is equally the Murdoch media’s determination to run dead on a vast array of issues thereby reducing the flow of information to the well. No surprises the “issues” the company chooses to run dead on are the myriad flawed policies or policies of questionable morality, a veritable avalanche of policy and service delivery failures, and rampant acts of misconduct if not outright corruption, of the LNP Government.
Limited News is more ‘mushroom compost’ than ‘news service’.
It tends to cause constipation in cats who see it beneath their litter.
Well if you subscribe the Oz the knowledge deficit of the subscriber is locked in
There’s better compost material about
Numerous surveys in the US have found that FUX viewers are not simply uninformed but seriously misinformed.
Cannot wait to tell my friends who subscribe to ‘The Australian’ that they are being set aside for two weeks while the remainder of their infamous publisher’s papers take a different tack. In essence, they are being preserved in their 20th century mindsets while Murdoch’s other media take a temporary walk on the wild side of 21st century reality.
Will they be shaving their legs?
Did they ever come from Miami, FLA?
It’s hilarious that they’re quarantining their supposedly intelligent readership from the entire campaign
‘pretentious readership’ I think that should read.
Otherwise, I agree, spicelab.
I am hoping that more and more of the public are getting savvy to the spin rather than accepting the latest line that’s being pushed by Murdoch and politicians.
It’s a slow process reducing the gullibility of a nation, but fortunately you don’t have to have everyone calling out the bs, you just need enough to make a difference, so that the spin stops working. Then presumably, they’ll give up doing it and look for some new way that works.
Who knows…maybe they’ll give authenticity a go?
Ah, authenticity … if you can fake that you’ve got it made.
And you mean that sincerely ….
They’ll still play their self-appointed role as handbrake to necessary action. 2050 is out there somewhere.
qv Lou Reed’s junkie – “..feeling so fine,until tomorrow but that’s just some other time“.