Washington Post fails to Tell The Truth about the most seminal story in human history
The Washington Post’s slogan is “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. The Post must wake up to the severity of the unfolding climate and ecological catastrophe. It must mobilize all its resources — its collective intelligence, editorial flare and skill, and thirst for the truth — to protect life. Democracy will not survive on a dead planet.
The Post is lagging behind its competitors, including The Guardian and The New York Times, in terms of the quantity and quality of its reporting on the climate and ecological emergency.
The Washington Post has improved its climate coverage in recent years — in 2020, it won the Pulitzer for explanatory reporting for a series on global heating. But one award-winning series is not enough. And it continues to run stories that undo the hard work of everyone who is trying to sound the alarm.
Here’s a short selection of The Post’s blunders. If you have other examples, then please send them to xrdcmedia[@]protonmail.com and we will include them here.
Examples:
Want to learn more? Here’s the Pro-Bernie Climate Scientist Op-Ed the Washington Post Wouldn’t Run
The Washington Post and CNN declined to be part of Covering Climate Now, an innovative model that allows news outlets to collaborate and report on the climate crisis with the sustained attention and urgency the emergency deserves. This collaborative effort was founded by CJR and The Nation, in association with The Guardian.
Why the exceptionalism? According to the founder of Covering Climate Now: “They [the WaPo] did not want to look like they were part of a campaign or trying to push a certain agenda on their readers." The climate crisis is not an agenda - it is scientific fact. The Washington Post should adopt Covering Climate Now’s innovative model, which sets a new standard for more, improved climate coverage.
Learn more about Covering Climate Now here: https://www.coveringclimatenow.org/partners
The Washington Post launched “Climate Solutions” in 2019 to tell stories about “individuals, companies and other organizations that are exploring ways to address our most significant environmental problems.” The series has run stories about how Copenhagen may become the first carbon-neutral city by 2025, how scientists are growing and planting new coral in reef structures in Florida and the Caribbean, and how an Israeli company is working to revolutionize recycling. But the series largely ignores the systemic problems at the heart of the climate crisis and the type of system-level solutions that we need to address the emergency.
The Washington Post Live is the newsroom’s “live journalism platform”. It aims to be a space for government officials, business leaders and emerging voices to discuss the most pressing national and global issues of the day
In 2020, it has devoted only one of its 26 sessions to climate change. The show was an Earth Day video-conference call entitled “Leading the fight against climate change”.
In 2019, only one of its 43 sessions was about the climate and ecological emergency - the gravest existential threat facing humankind
In fact, since its inception in 2010, these shows are the only two times that The Washington Post Live has discussed the climate and ecological emergency.
Its “Executive Actions” series features the likes of Bank of America, which is praised for its “sustainability.” In truth, Bank of America is a major fossil fuel financer.
It routinely features companies that are heavily invested in fossil fuels, including The Carlyle Group, as well as executives from the airline industry and private equity firms like Blackstone. These firms are destroying the planet for profit, but The Post Live talks about them reverentially.
At a minimum, The Washington Post must stop giving a platform to columnists who fail to understand climate science or the severity of the climate and ecological crisis. The Post must emulate thought-leaders like The Guardian, which has been running incisive stories and commentary on the crisis for years.
We are calling on The Washington Post to immediately overhaul its climate coverage. Read all about our demands here.
The Post also has a shameful history of giving voice to climate change deniers, even after NASA’s 1988 warning to Congress about the climate emergency. Here is an article from 1995 — seven years after NASA’s warning — in which The Washington Post quotes climate change denier Piers Corbyn, the brother of British politician Jeremy Corbyn:
“The man-made greenhouse theory will probably be regarded as the biggest scientific gaffe of the [20th] century.” - Piers Corbyn, The Washington Post, 1995
The Post must make up for its failure to tell the truth about the world’s most seminal story. For decades, The Washington Post and other news media have given equal voice to climate scientists and climate deniers. The wounds from this are evident:
More than half of Americans understand that 97% of scientists think global warming is happening and that it is caused by humans. However, only about one in five Americans understand how strong the level of consensus among scientists is. It is time for The Post to put the climate and ecological emergency front and centre in all its coverage.
Of all the greenhouse-gas emissions heating the land and oceans, 41 percent have occurred since 1990. Even after NASA’s warning about climate change in 1988, we made the climate crisis nearly twice as bad. This is partly because the media has failed to keep the issue “front and center, with the pressure on and the stakes made abundantly clear at every turn.”
From 1988 to 2002, 53 percent of the news stories about climate change in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times “gave ‘roughly equal attention’ to the view that humans were contributing to global warming, and the other view that exclusively natural fluctuations could explain the earth’s temperature increase,” states an analysis of 3,543 newspaper articles published in the peer-reviewed journal, Global Environmental Change.