Professor Of Journalism Says Journalists Shouldn’t Be Neutral When It Comes To Climate Doom

In case assistant professor Perry Parks of Michigan State missed it, most journalists who write about the climate scam are completely biased, as they are on most issues

Why journalists shouldn’t be neutral on climate change

The immediacy and the stakes of human-driven climate change have never been clearer. Yet journalists reporting on climate-driven disasters are still pulling punches in their coverage. They often don’t explicitly invoke climate change in their reporting and even more rarely do they identify the primary culprit behind it: the human consumption of fossil fuels, egged on by oil and gas companies that have long known better.

Journalists cherish their performance of neutrality when reporting on controversial issues. But this commitment to appearing “balanced” — even when one side relies on evidence and the other is making things up — has come at a profound cost. It’s led major news outlets to cover what should be the science story of our time through the lens of politics, resulting in a delayed, diminutive planetary response to the once slowly, and now rapidly, accelerating climate emergency.

Journalistic neutrality posits that it’s possible to approach a news story without filtering choices through some system of values: about what’s right and wrong, true and false, important and trivial, “normal” and deviant. But this long-held reporting norm is a fallacy. Contemporary media critics such as Jay Rosen and Lewis Raven Wallace have aptly argued that all communication originates in “a view from somewhere”: We are inevitably influenced by our experiences, our families, our peers and our moral commitments, and it’s more productive to recognize and acknowledge these commitments than to delude ourselves or (as journalists often do) overrepresent views we find harmful just to demonstrate impartiality.

This is what students are treated to in journalism school. They are taught to be biased. Impartial. Advocates. Activists. Hence why we see what we see in the news. How few treat the climate crisis (scam) as something to question.

There’s only one way for journalists to minimize harm around climate change — and that’s to fight it.

They are no longer journalists at that point. But, then, most journalists/reporters has stopped being such decades ago.

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