Journalism, Propaganda and Climate Change – Inside Climate News

Recently I was on a Zoom call with a philanthropic advisor who toward the end of our conversation asked me an open-ended question: What do you think is missing from climate communications today? He regarded journalism to be a branch of communications—perhaps I didn’t agree with that characterization, he wondered? 

For context he provided a quick review of communications strategies that have failed to move enough voters to action over recent decades. First came the notion of scaring people, his example being Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”; that gave way to the notion of providing the public with sober, high-quality information, but a knowledge deficit proved not to be the problem either; and so now the prevailing wisdom has become to give people hope, which is why philanthropic support is flowing into solutions journalism, he said. 

In his brief survey, he didn’t mention a large part of the problem—that since the 1980s, climate science has been up against formidable opposition. The oil industry and its fellow travelers, aiming to preserve the economic supremacy of carbon energy, have poured more than a billion dollars into erecting a powerful infrastructure of misinformation. They have built a false climate narrative to discredit the scientific consensus, abetted by the parallel ascension of Fox News. 

The industry’s communications playbook, developed to undermine environmental concern, has like Frankenstein escaped from the lab and infected public discourse in almost every sphere. Their techniques of kneecapping facts have proven so effective that agnotology has become a subject of growing academic attention—agnotology being the study of the deliberate creation of ignorance.

Also of tragic and consequential relevance to the philanthropic advisor’s question: Journalism itself has suffered its greatest contraction since the founding of the republic—especially local journalism, and with it, environmental reporting. 

The Zoom call was nearing its end. My thoughts were exploding. I could only begin to answer his question. It deserves broad and open discussion. This brief essay is a contribution to that end.

A Persistent Illusion 

Indeed, the advisor surmised correctly: I do not consider journalism to be a branch of communications.

Certainly, journalism communicates; many colleges and universities lump the two fields together in their degree programs, and the ranks of public relations agencies are filled with former journalists. They appear to be on the same spectrum of activity and are widely regarded to be. But it’s a persistent illusion that does damage to democracy. 

Methodologically, the communications paradigm starts with an agenda, frequently of a paying customer. It crafts messages, often perfected in focus groups, aimed at specific targets in pursuit of a predetermined outcome. It stages events and deploys materials and spokespeople across multiple platforms in coordinated campaigns whose results are carefully measured. It’s worth adding that it regards the free press as something to be instrumentalized to serve its ends, “unearned media” being one of the most valuable coins of its realm.

Now imagine a newsroom. Not a cable news channel, or the opinion desk of a major national daily, but a local outlet, with reporters and editors covering their communities. They are on the receiving end of communications campaigns and fold the flood of incoming spin into their work, which is to find out what is really happening and determine what is newsworthy. Their job is not to tell their readers what to do or think, but to bear witness, listen to all stakeholders, consult experts, follow the evidence wherever it leads and craft stories that reflect what they learn with fairness and accuracy for community benefit. 

These are simplifications, but they suggest a sobering re-classification: communications as a form of propaganda, given its techniques of manipulation, its arrogation of power. And journalism, a discipline peculiar to democracy, as a form of education, which through daily acts of original discovery and persistent disclosure—exercising the right to know—serves as a check on power and wrongdoing. 

This is not to say that communications cannot beneficially educate; or that journalism cannot become propaganda. The point here is about methods and goals: whether the endgame is to manipulate a desired behavior or the goal is to build enduring public understanding. The fundamental difference is perhaps best summed up by a familiar adage: Give a person a fish, feed them for a day. Teach a person to fish, feed them for life. The first action might buy you a vote, or even an election. The second will build you a civilization.

Flooding the Zone

We tend to celebrate the origins of American journalism (Founding Fathers, First Amendment, Fourth Estate) but ignore the genesis and development of America’s propaganda culture. Since the dawn of the 20^th century, it has been deeply interwoven into the fabric of our commerce and politics. 

The birth of public relations and its associated techniques of persuasion can be traced back to a man named Edward Bernays. He was, significantly, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and helped to popularize his uncle’s ideas in America. He also put them to work on behalf of government and corporations. His first major success was selling the public on U.S. entry into World War I, right after American voters had put Woodrow Wilson in the White House on a peace platform. In 1928, Bernays wrote a slim volume about the theory and technique of shaping public opinion. He didn’t call his book Public Relations. He called it, simply, Propaganda, a word which had yet to acquire its pernicious connotations. 

Here is his book’s first sentence: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

It’s hardly an ode to America’s democratic experiment, built around an educated citizenry that elects a government of the people, by the people, for the people. It’s more a manifesto that foreshadows the authoritarianism of the 1930s—Stalin, Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao—and of the present era. We do not think much about what it means that publicists now outnumber journalists six to one. 

American journalism at the local level especially has probably never been in such a weakened condition. It remains a dire national emergency. Yet this emergency is largely being treated as a business story, a form of “creative destruction,” a trend to adapt to rather than the existential threat to democracy that it is, even by many of those who are trying to rescue it. 

In 2018, we opened our first state bureaus at Inside Climate News, and not long afterwards, I found myself on a phone call with the representative of a large funder in the climate arena. I made my pitch. He responded politely, encouragingly even, but declined to support our nascent local work, explaining that they were looking into making investments in communications capacities that mimicked Cambridge Analytica’s. 

The public square has acquiesced to the notion of a “post-fact world” far too easily and thoughtlessly, without a fight. Yet facts govern our lives, and will continue to do so, even if we lose the ability to recognize them.

News of that scandal had recently attracted global attention: The company had secured thousands of data points on tens of millions of Facebook users and deployed psychographic analysis and behavioral microtargeting in a bid to influence the 2016 election. The funder was placing their bets on building a parallel propaganda capacity.

ICN had better luck elsewhere, and since then we have opened bureaus in states across the country, more than doubling in size. We are poised to double in size again. But since then, too, technology has only amplified the arms race for hearts and minds with exponentially more powerful tools of persuasion and distraction. We are already reaping the whirlwind, even as AI daily gathers more ground and formidable force. 

The public square has acquiesced to the notion of a “post-fact world” far too easily and thoughtlessly, without a fight. Yet facts govern our lives, and will continue to do so, even if we lose the ability to recognize them. 

In the case of climate change, what we refuse to know is already killing us. What’s missing from climate communications? Maybe that’s not the right question. Maybe the right question is how to flood the zone with truth. 

For our part at ICN, we have been developing some answers by opening bureaus around the country. We have found that with just two reporters in a state—sometimes with only one, sometimes with a strong cohort of freelancers—we can work with partner newsrooms and dispel silence and counter misinformation. We can revive and elevate the local environmental conversation and have it revolve around the facts people care deeply about: what is happening to the water they drink, to the air they breathe, to the land they inhabit—right where they live—while holding leaders and polluters accountable. 

Our work is free for anyone to read. Our work is free for our media partners to publish—we have hundreds. In this way, with every story, our newsroom reliably examines our relationship to the natural world and participates in the noble work of maintaining a republic of knowledge. Our daily work has now come to stand as one counterweight to the almost complete dismantling of the federal architecture of environment protection now underway.

Our democracy is being sorely tested. Under assault are the institutions that guard the integrity of facts and extend the power of rational discourse, which produce understanding and preserve the rule of law: The legal profession and the courts. Universities, institutes and labs. The free press. 

These are the bulwarks of accountability that are still standing in the way of the cynical attempt to usher in a republic of ignorance. Our democracy would be so much stronger right now if our country had six times as many journalists as we do.