The Columbia Journalism School of New York City has announced a media seminar “Climate Changes Everything – Creating a Blueprint for Media Transformation” to be held September 21 and 22, 2023. The tagline for it reads: “Join leading journalists from around the world for an unprecedented conversation about how to cover a world on fire.”
They start out with a lie, the world isn’t “on fire” at all. To say this sort of media collusion to “get their stories straight” on climate is wrong, would be an understatement. This seminar violates virtually every principle as defined by the American Press Institute in their “The elements of journalism” definitions, especially the tenet “Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.” With this sort of collusion, independence on the topic of climate change essentially disappears.
The press release for it, from their webpage, is below:
Reporters, editors, and news executives from Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, CBS News, Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism, France Télévisions, the Guardian, South Florida’s NBC 6, NowThis, Telemundo, TIME, The Times of India, and The Weather Channel — among many other outlets, large and small — will join with hundreds of colleagues to chart a course for tackling the climate story in ways that drive attention and impact while highlighting solutions and justice.
- Hear from newsrooms innovating to meet the moment: How can news outlets everywhere treat climate change as a story for every beat, not just silo it on the weather desk?
- Discuss whether news outlets should still take fossil fuel advertising, and how journalists can grapple with climate disinformation.
- Look ahead to 2024 elections that will have profound implications for global climate action. How can journalists make those implications clear to voters, refute misinformation, and hold candidates accountable?
- Learn from journalists covering and living in frontline communities how to highlight climate justice in our reporting.
- Recognize that telling the entire climate story means not just including solutions — but interrogating those solutions, so the public and policymakers know which ones actually work.
- Plus, get a front row seat to interviews with special guests and global climate luminaries.
CLIMATE CHANGES EVERYTHING will be a participatory event, with networking breaks, a town hall, and working sessions on key conference themes.
We’re at a moment of historic opportunity for journalism. Climate coverage around the world is better than ever, but so much more is needed: more energy, more creativity, more commitment. Let’s forge a path forward, together.
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Despite decades of coordinated effort by the most-powerful media outlets in Western society, voters still put “climate change” dead last of their priority list in polls. That is something significant that the media is ignoring with this new push. Or, perhaps it worries them.
It could be the progressive elites that control global information are so worried that voters “simply don’t care” enough about climate that they feel the need to redouble their coordinated efforts to hyperbolize the climate crisis. This arguably good news, suggesting that efforts like those undertaken daily at Climate Realism, WattsUpWithThat, and many other climate realist efforts for the past three decades have not been in vain. This principled and often lonely work of climate realists to speak truth to power has been effective, at least when you compare it to the sort of budgets these media giants have.
The low-funded David has struck the massively funded Goliath … if not with a kill shot, at least one that wounded him and got him worried that he might lose. The bravery of climate skeptics worldwide has proven more powerful than media because we have the truth on our side. Why? Because of what Goliath didn’t expect from us: climate skeptics have the courage to say the truth, and never stop no matter the cost.
While the Media writes about the supposed “consensus” and “settled science,” climate realists point out that consensus is a political, not scientific term and that science is never “settled.” On the question of catastrophic climate change, following the scientific method, testing theories against data, indicates that no such crisis is in the offing. Most types of extreme weather events are not getting worse.
The only thing keeping the “climate crisis” narrative afloat this long is the influence of wealthy elites in Western nations and the power-hungry politicians beholden them who keep pouring taxpayers money into the climate scheme for the purposes of gaining power by trying to control energy. Eventually, the climate panic will end. The Soviet Union was considered even more permanent than the United States and the Western capitalist model, for at least two generations. Yet it fell, like the climate crisis will, because the “science” of communism and socialism was as fraudulent as the “science” that says humans are causing a climate catastrophe.
Jim Lakely, Vice President for Communications at The Heartland Institute also contributed to this story.
