Climate Reporting and Reality

How Climate Blueprint Activists are Putting Impact before Facts

In Michael Crichton’s 2004 bestseller, State of Fear, the head of the National Environmental Resource Fund, Nicholas Drake, bemoaning the lack of major climate crises that would support his campaigns, conspired to trigger an environmental catastrophe. 20 years later, Nicholas would have found an easier solution: Just pay journalists to reshape the climate narrative by dramatizing the events, creating impact and driving change.

In September, 2023, there was a conference for journalists called “Climate Changes Everything”.  From that event, two climate activist media organizations, Solutions Journalism Network and Covering Climate Now, developed the idea of a “Climate Blueprint for Media Transformation”. Last month they published their document in the Columbia Journalism Review, laying out key guidelines on how to transform media reporting. They were not just looking at reporting on climate change but to transform all reporting into a form of climate change reporting.

When I was a journalism student at Carleton University in the 1980s, and as a professor when I taught journalism students at Vesalius College in the 2000s, I took the line that reporters had to report the news – taking the existing information and known facts while telling the story of an event in a responsible manner. I would never have considered journalism as driving change and creating impact. But this is how activists envision what climate journalism should be about – not following the narrative but defining it. They aim to transform journalism to meet their activist agenda.

This is a two-part article on the “Climate Blueprint for Media Transformation” campaign. This part will look at how the Blueprint lays out the climate activists’ guidelines on what journalists should focus on in their reporting on climate issues. The second part will look at the foundations funding the two NGOs, as well as the funding made available to supplement the incomes of journalists wanting to report on climate change.

More Inclusion, Less Information

The very title of the activist document seeks a transformation in how climate reporting is done. From the Introduction, the blueprint is a clarion call for more diversity and inclusion in climate reporting, with more indigenous communities telling their stories in order to make a greater impact. “The knowledge, spirit and skills of Indigenous people worldwide continue to inspire local and global climate solutions, and it’s up to us to report on these issues but also continue to support Indigenous journalists in doing so.” Note: all further quotes in this article are from this Blueprint document.

Climate reporting needs to engage with all communities.  There is an interconnected nature of climate issues that must be stressed. “The concerns of women, people of color, Indigenous peoples, the LGBTQIA+ community, the colonized and the Global South have too often been ignored or left out of the story.”  It is clear that climate events affect people, but the advice to climate journalists is to only focus on certain groups of people (that matter to the activists).

In a later chapter, it was clear that any reporting on climate needs to be humanized and that “climate stories intersect with the economy, with health and mental health, with food availability and agriculture, and even with domestic violence.” In other words, all ills that all victims suffer can be linked to climate change. Reporting should focus on the victims and be sure to weave climate change into the analysis.

Redefining Experts

While there is no doubt that Western societies, especially post-COVID, are turning away from relying on expertise in the decision-making process. Our social media networks are more trusted than any expert (or person who studied sciences in school). The Blueprint calls on journalists to “redefine experts as people with lived experience and agency.” A Columbia Journalism School climate justice “expert” continues: “Too often, journalists get caught up in the latest science and feature only academic researchers on the so-called cutting edge of climate solutions. But in doing so, they forget to center the voices of people who are experiencing these realities every single day.” In other words, victims are far more valuable than any expert when reporting on climate issues. The section even gave advice on how to report on, and value, a person who states that “drought is caused by evil spirits” (and it does not involve speaking to any so-called water experts).

Data is seen as meaningless in the climate impact story. The Blueprint states: “Data by itself never tells the story, and many times reality presents a totally different version. People can actually explain what changes mean, why they are occurring and what impact they are having in their lives.” The victims are the real experts and they should be the story. Their anecdotal memories are far more valuable than any scientific data.

Make an Impact

The Climate Blueprint for Media Transformation is about ensuring that climate reporting is impactful. The only way people can understand how serious the climate crisis is, would be by showing them the impact (and not the news).

In other words, journalists need to address the “narrative challenge of connecting individual lived experiences to the global phenomenon of climate change”. One of the contributors to the Blueprint has designed an Impact Tracking Guide to help the “newsroom articulate and track the impact you intend to generate among audiences and communities”. Curiously, another author in the Blueprint was touting another AI Impact Tracker for journalists.

Impact is the new activist journalist buzzword. If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it, and it seems that climate journalism is no longer about filing a story and reporting the news, but on making an impact. But impact is a normative term and not everyone is similarly impacted by the same events. The activists believe the role of a climate journalist is to ensure that they are. It can be assumed that if the desired impact is not achieved, then the journalists need to go back and adjust their strategy.

This is activism (bordering on marketing), not journalism.

Focus on impact is an interesting evolution as journalism morphs into a form of mass media activism. Ideas are not to be reported, but rather marketed and sold to the reader. The idea needing to be sold to the news consumers is that climate change is the most serious existential crisis facing the world, and you, reader, must be very afraid. A reporter now measures success with how many readers respond and react, with how afraid they become and with how much change (revolution) can come from this. The change that journalists are expected to impose via their reporting fits the activist’s ideology (well expressed in the Blueprint).

When you employ activists to train journalists on how to report on climate issues, they end up training them to be activists.

Molding a New Generation of Climate Reporting

The Climate Blueprint for Media Transformation seeks to refashion reporting on climate issues, making it more impact driven, focusing more on diversity, inclusion and indigenous perspectives while redefining what climate expertise is. The victim is the expert and their story is more powerful (more impactful) than facts. Impact-driven reporting aims at being drivers of change which is in line with the evolutionary shift in the mainstream media from news reporting to events activism.

If I were still a journalism professor today (if universities still gave courses to journalism students), I don’t think I would use their Blueprint document as the main textbook.

This Blueprint serves as the baseline for the two media NGOs involved, Solutions Journalism Network and Covering Climate Now, to embark on a journalist training and funding campaign. Their advice should almost be considered as cute in a naive, waifish manner, except that these two activist groups are raising millions from foundations seeking to use this media transformation to control the climate narrative. Foundations don’t fund news, they support impact campaigns that the fund managers can measure and take back to their trustees. If Nicolas Drake in State of Fear were a real person, today he would be a fiscal sponsor consultant conspiring from some foundation backroom.

Waifs with unlimited funds do require some scrutiny. It is to the second part, the foundation funding and meddling, that this analysis now turns.