Within my March 23 blog post blog post about what appears to be enviro-activists’ gaslighting efforts to claim ‘reports on the climate issue are fewer than in prior years,’ I described how I created a daily email alert out of the Google organization for any story containing the words “global warming.” In predictable fashion, an article which is likely an outgrowth of the above gaslighting effort was one among those recent results, written by two ‘journalism professors’ for the Neiman Reports ‘leadership in journalism‘ website. Just from its title alone in the email alert – “What Is Happening to Climate Journalism?” – I could make an educated guess about its biased slant, and after reading its subheading “Amid layoffs and industry belt-tightening, quality of coverage, not quantity, becomes even more important,” I could guess with more precision what its massive irony was going to be within the article. Hence my facetious blog post title, a dig at why the ‘journalism professors’ ought to hand in their university resignations and sincerely apologize to all the students they misled over their teaching tenures – starting with the false premise right within their own article title.
“Climate Journalism.” Ever wonder why there are not entire fraternities of reporters specializing in …. Astronomical journalism? Chemistry journalism? Physics journalism?
Quite simply because none of those basic topics are in dire need of manipulation in order to herd public opinion in a particular direction. That necessity right there is an indicator that we have a major unresolved problem within the collective ‘journalism’ profession.
Way back in 2014 within my GelbspanFiles post about the origins of the “skeptic climate scientists don’t deserve fair media balance” talking point, I illustrated how the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) wasn’t formed to benignly and objectively report about environmental stories in general, but instead had the goal to constantly hammer home an elemental talking point about how the ‘science’ of catastrophic global warming was settled, which in turn removes a reporter’s obligation to give equal time to skeptic climate scientists; just as a reporter would never allow equal time / fair media balance for Holocaust deniers, or shill scientists working for Big Tobacco who deny the harm of cigarette smoking. And – speaking of ‘shills’ – skeptic climate scientists are on the payroll of Big Oil to spread disinformation anyway. One of the founding members* of the SEJ pushed that accusation, a Facebook Friend of Ross Gelbspan when Gelbspan was still alive.
Ross Gelbspan’s famous 1997 accusation, no less, about skeptic climate scientists working for the fossil fuel industry. Which SEJ journalists – had they been free of bias at the time – could have very easily proven to themselves how that accusation was totally false.
*Aside: to illustrate how low SEJ’s bar is on journalism integrity:
• among its other founding members was Phil Shabecoff, who I covered here, regarding the initial role of his Greenwire fax news service in promulgating one specific false aspect of the main accusation about fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns;
• they allowed Ross Gelbspan to join their ranks when they themselves could’ve excommunicated him from the profession for committing one of the biggest acts of stolen journalism valor in their profession;
• the Associated Press’ Seth Borenstein advised that reporters’ climate libraries should begin and end with Gelbspan’s 1997 book;
• American Thinker article contributor Christopher J. Alleva labeled the SEJ in 2007 as a “Global Warming Propaganda Factory”;
• At SEJ’s Oct 2009 annual conference featuring Al Gore as a keynote speaker who permitted a Q&A session to follow, journalist Phelim McAleer properly signed in to participate, and after asking Gore a tough question and answering Gore’s own question … was bodily prevented from continuing, noting afterward: “At the Society for Environmental Journalists, the reaction of the journalists … was to shut down the journalist and protect the politician.”
• and predictably, one of the two authors of the above “What Is Happening to Climate Journalism?” article discloses she is an SEJ board member.
The opening salvo from these two authors was the basically disingenuous notion about diminishing climate issue ‘reporting,’ claiming there’s “evidence to support recent reports of diminishing climate journalism” from the major TV news outlets. Uh, huh – define “journalism.” When you have places like the PBS NewsHour provably abdicating from their responsibility to tell the full story, that ain’t journalism. Maybe there is a decrease in name-brand news outlets pushing the climate issue as a ‘crisis,’ but like I showed in my March 23 blog post, what’s being put out on the issue from all sources across the board is still wall-to-wall coverage. 61 story results on one specific day with a second email alert containing 13 more. I’d swear ClimaChange™ is increasingly causing a rise in secondary ‘but-wait,-there’s-more‘ email alerts from Google to me within the same day on global warming online publication results.
Without even realizing it, these two authors inadvertently emphasized the necessity to toe the ‘global warming science is settled‘ propaganda line, in two places within their piece.
Reports of increases or decreases over short time horizons miss this bigger picture …
What matters more is who is doing the reporting. The health of climate journalism is not best measured by the volume of coverage; instead, it’s about the people …
Make sure it is the right people, in other words. The propagandists. The ones who know how to control the narrative.
Climate reporting must be informed by an underlying understanding of the human-caused drivers of climate change. This is why specialist positions held by journalists familiar with reporting on the climate crisis are essential.
News organizations with climate or environmental reporters on staff are much more likely to connect extreme heat to climate change in coverage and to discuss climate solutions, as compared to news organizations without these dedicated positions in the newsroom.
“Climate or environmental reporters” – that’s disingenuous. “Climate propagandists,” is more accurate. Dedicated pushers who will never dare to suggest the climate changes and always has. Allow people in ‘non-dedicated people’ in the newsrooms to question any part of the orthodoxy that humans are the primary drivers of it, and the battle to win the information war starts to cede critical ground.
I had to laugh at the timing of another article that arrived in my daily Google alerts a day or two after the one above, a piece on “Caribbean Journalists Converge to Strengthen Climate Reporting,” which contained the following gem at the bottom which I’m certain both of these ‘journalism professor’ authors would heartily endorse:
“Journalists need to reframe climate impacts and better recognise a direct relationship with social justice, responsibility, and solutions,” … “This helps ensure stories reflect lived experience, structural inequality, and the urgency of coordinated regional action.”
“The media is more than a mirror of our reality, it is a force that can shape it,” … “In the face of climate change, its power lies in turning distant warnings into urgent human stories, awakening not just awareness, but responsibility.
An informed people is an empowered people, and an empowered people can change the course of our future.”
An informed people also has the power to completely kill the climate issue, when they discover it has every appearance in the world of not actually being a problem in need of solving, has nothing to do with responsibility or ‘social justice’ at all, and that “the media” has long been literally little more than a mouthpiece regurgitating unsupportable propaganda about ‘settled science’ and ‘liars-for-hire’ industry shills.
I couldn’t have said this better myself in connection to the way the climate issue is a window into the world of how political disinformation works: From David DeMay’s August 1, 2026 AmericanThinker article on the ‘Anthony Fauci’ meltdown: he says the following to emphasize what the real ‘crisis’ is affecting us all, legacy news media malfeasance in the form of Machiavellian efforts to keep political agendas alive:
Modern media has perfected this principle into an industrial science. It does not exist to report facts as they occur on the ground; it functions as a narrative management system designed to enforce compliance, manufacture consent, and insulate preferred authority figures from empirical scrutiny.
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There might be a Part 2 to this. While the subheading for these two journalism professor authors’ article about quality over quantity might not have been of their own choosing, it was intriguing nevertheless, when it comes to what kind of quality they teach to their students. Since they both have public university email addresses, I sent both a somewhat cryptic email inquiry, saying I’d rather not identify who I was in order to not skew their answer in any way concerning my general observation of misinformation in the issue (reporters are a bit too quick to be repeating information items without making certain the items are above reproach) and my direct question of “when a report is put out on the climate issue and an ordinary citizen responds with, “Climate scientists who are skeptics of human-induced climate change dispute all of this,” what should the response be?” One of the two authors answered, but with just four sentences about “unattributed” stories on social media, which indicated that she completely overlooked what the main point of my inquiry was: the failure of ‘journalists’ to fact-check what they are fed. So, I resubmitted my inquiry, but an auto-reply came back saying she was not returning from her vacation until the end of August.