The climate crisis is, quite literally, burning the world. With record heat across the northern hemisphere, people are dying — both quickly in the moment and slowly from the smoke choking cities — while ecosystems are destroyed. From Russia, across Canada to Hawaii, the planet is on fire.
“The era of global boiling has arrived,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres has declared.
And the world’s media? Missing in action — most of them, anyway — refusing to fulfil journalism’s promise: to put the facts together in a way that should power the world to respond with the urgency the moment demands.
In Australia, it’s even worse, with our increasingly insular media happy to be left hanging off the end of a US-centric supply chain of what passes for news.
It’s part repeat, part rhyme, of the failures of the Australian media during our 2019-20 fires. While the ABC (in particular) did a great job of reporting the impact across affected communities, the overall analysis by traditional media was so egregiously poor that it shocked even a Murdoch, driving James out of the family-controlled News Corp.
It repeats, in the traditional media’s consistent reluctance to link a burning planet to the climate crisis — much less to the fossil fuels driving it — other than in the most mealy-mouthed of ways. The rhyme, now, is its added failure to recognise the global dimension.
The dramatic footage of the fires in Hawaii is filling out the world’s television news. It’s already ranked as America’s worst: “At least 114 people have died in the western Maui wildfires and more than 1000 people remain missing. With nearly 3000 homes and businesses destroyed or damaged, losses are estimated to be $6 billion,” the US ABC network reported at the weekend.
Yet in all the words and images put to air, a survey of two days of US national television news at the height of the emergency found that exactly none of the free-to-air networks where most Americans still get their news referred to the climate crisis in their reports.
Two out of the three cable news networks managed to fit some climate crisis-adjacent chat into eight of 174 segments about the fires. Shocked-not-shocked — the missing cable network was Fox News.
Instead the Murdoch-owned network was back in its happy place, with Substack’s Decoding Fox News reporting the poor person’s Tucker Carlson (Jesse Watters), nodding at conspiracy theories, including that old corporate favourite, a rash of arson.
Maybe the Hawaii fires could be a breakthrough moment in our understanding of this year’s northern summer of fires. But the only reason we know so much about them is because they’re happening in the US, in front of US cameras. News supply chains mean that when it comes to offshore news, Australia gets what US audiences get. It’s a reminder that “news” happens most where journalists happen to be, not (as we’d like to think) the other way around.
Ever-present US exceptionalism means Hawaii’s fires are rarely linked to all the other record fires across the hemisphere: Canada’s worst wildfire season (which we hear most about when the smoke chokes US cities); the state of emergency across most of Russia’s Siberian provinces (largely unreported in the Western media despite the extreme risk of greenhouse gas release); the fires in north Africa (where 34 people died) and the Mediterranean islands of Greece and Italy (which, in global media, were largely reported through the lens of disrupted northern European tourists), or the impending dangers as summer temperatures rise in the Amazon Basin.
The media’s failure to properly contextualise this summer of burning is a crisis of practice: we’re still struggling to work out how to report the climate emergency and its impact across the news spectrum. It’s not too late for journalists to learn how best to integrate both distal and proximate causes in reporting big events. At the moment, the best we seem to be able to do, deep down in any story, is fall back on the crutch of “environmentalists say”. Surely journalists can do better than that.
It’s part simple cowardice: the global right continues to play with the fire of denialism (as even Tony Abbott’s attorney-general George Brandis was shocked to report from the UK at the weekend) and News Corp stays busy policing any reporting that strays too close to talk of crisis (Guterres’ “global boiling” was “stupid” and “hysterical” according to The Australian’s US correspondent Adam Creighton).
Age and demographics suggest that the median consumer of traditional media — particularly commercial television news — is far closer to the views of the sceptics. That encourages outlets to keep their heads down and puff the pictures while reporting simply the barest of “what just happened”.
But it’s the price of short-changing the audience they have while alienating the emerging audiences they need.
Are you happy with Australian media’s coverage of the world’s fires? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Surely we should be using the term ‘global warming’? Somehow it’s been watered down to ‘climate change’ which can mean either hotter or colder. It doesn’t allude to heat or potentially hellish temperatures.
What’s interesting (I can’t find sources anymore – did a uni assignment on it tho) is that conservatives are more responsive to the term global warming than to climate change (the inverse is true for progressives). They’re more likely to think global warming is a threat, that it is happening, and that people are causing it.
Insofar as watering down goes – global warming refers only to the rising surface temp. Climate change is that plus all the bonuses that go with it (weather, melt, sea level, fire risk etc).
I think it was Karl Rove who suggested to GWBush to cease saying “global warming” and instead use “climate change”.
Yes, to then be able to respond with – “But climate is always changing.”
It was much earlier, HW not Shrub.
Personally I’m much more at ease with “climate change” because it covers so many extreme conditional swings in our environment, that effect the conditions under which we exist, as multiple species, on our rapidly changing one and only planet – from devastating pendulus shifts in temperature/heat to droughts to floods, blizzards and storms.
I’ve always thought “global warming” was too open to the closed, literal closed, pre-set mind-set (that relies on the likes of SAD to feed it) interpretation – where unseasonal devastating “cold snaps” could be waved around as ‘proof that global warming is a beat-up’ – even while it’s not as though they’re susceptible to persuasion, and they vote.
There are only two immutable laws – those of physics and chemistry. Everything else is a product of human imagination, invention, discovery, and action. Everything humanity has built may disappear because those laws are immutable.
How about climate catastrophe?
But as I understand it, although the planet is definitely heating up, it will have various effects in different places. For example, if the north Atlantic Gulf Stream is disrupted, north western Europe will become much colder. And there will be more, less predictable rain in many places. Maybe some term like ‘climate chaos’ is most accurate; but there’s also the question of whatever best grabs the public’s attention.
While parts of the planet may indeed become cooler, those are local effects of global warming.
And ‘climate chaos’ is not really accurate either. It’s weather that is the chaotic system. Climate is more predictable.
You’re using the future tense in large parts of your comment Woopwoop. It’s already happening!
It was Bush Snr at Rio in 1992 who insisted that the phrase ‘global warming’ be altered to ‘climate change’ else the USA would not sign.
He also pointed out that “the American lifestyle is not negotiatable”.
The USofAholes didn’t sign in the end but the word change was already printed in the final communique.
The more energy – aka heat – in the atmosphere the greater the disruption of the global weather system, hurricanes at higher latitudes, fewer,weaker monsoons across the Indian subcontinent, floods, droughts, extreme cold & heat and changes to ocean currents.
My particular fear is disruption of the Gulf Stream which provides the western isles with a relatively benign compared to Continental Europe.
For the last 3 years, the UK Shipping forecast, which cover from Spain to Iceland and the eastern Atlantic has reported massively reduced Beaufort readings which govern the weather of western Ireland & Scotland.
…”a relatively benign CLIMATE compared to Continental Europe.”
This PR guy in the US who suggested using climate change over gloabl warming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz
The time is rapidly coming when we realise Hanrahan was right.
I think the better term is ‘Climate Crisis’ or Climate Emergency’.
Of course we are all waiting to see what the Southern Hemisphere summer produces. The Fire and Emergency establishments have been pretty unequivocal with their warnings.
Ninefax papers recently reported on the overwhelming heat at a world scout jamboree in Korea. Several countries packed up and went home early. Numerous kids hospitalised.
But was there a peep about the climate catastrophe causing this sort of “unprecedented” heat? About the folly of holding a jamboree in midsummer in our climate-changed world? Let alone a reflection about the contribution of all that international jet travel to making things worse?
No – just a heatwave.
Too many media owner dictators are joined at the hip-pocket nerve to fossil fuel advertiser sponsors – to care about the vast majority rest of mankind.
Take the long view..with the prospect that the 2˚C target of the Paris agreement becomes unattainable (it was very optimistic when agreed)..then 5˚C is a reality the has dire implications, with immediate effect.
insurance, re-sale value of properties at permanent risk of flood and/or fire..just liveability of areas north of Brisbane..or Sydney..or Melbourne (which has already had 45˚C days..)the last ‘black’ day fire has three days of above 45˚C
a delusional situation which will be very clear ten years from now..so Pollyanna has a place to preserve a little sanity..
if mental health is an issue now, it will pale by comparison to near future events..