As the planet burns, the world’s media wilfully ignores the big picture

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.