The mainstream media has begun to call Donald Trump out for racism, as HuffPost notes in banner headlines. But Donald Trump is also a climate science denier — and the mainstream media mostly ignores it.
Obviously racism and climate denial are very different things. Racism has been harming vast numbers of people for centuries. Many have called it “America’s original sin.” The worst harms of climate denial lay ahead — though the gravest danger also happens to be to the poor and disenfranchised.
I bring this question up because racism and climate denial do, in their own way, both pose an existential threat to the idea of America — and because the pushback on Trump’s racist statements is being trumpeted as the media’s “Murrow Moment.”
I have little doubt the legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow, who spoke out against Senator Joe McCarthy six decades ago, would also be speaking out against climate science denial.
If he were alive today, Edward R. Murrow would likely be speaking out against climate science denial
On March 9, 1954, Edward R. Murrow hosted “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy,” perhaps the most famous episode of his CBS show, See It Now. As I wrote two years ago, in this time of climate crisis and climate silence — Murrow is a reminder that at one time journalists spoke out on the greatest issues of the day: “This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent…. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities.”
The New York Times has called Edward R. Murrow, “perhaps the most esteemed American journalist since Ben Franklin.” Even back in 1990, the Times could write: “Since his day, commercial television has shown little enthusiasm for controversy of the sort that he courted; all the news divisions take chances from time to time, but the intervals seem long, and none of his successors conveys the passionate conviction that came so naturally to him.”
How far journalism has further descended since then can be seen daily on Fox News and the cable news scream-fests. Until Trump’s attack on the ethnic heritage of a U.S.-born federal judge, Murrow’s courage and moral outrage in the face of injustice and intimidation seemed to be of a lost era.
In its banner story, “The Media Is On The Edge Of A Murrow Moment,” Ryan Grim, the HuffPost’s Washington bureau chief explains, “In the closing remarks to Murrow’s pivotal newscast, one can hear loud echoes today.”
“This is no time for men who oppose Sen. McCarthy’s methods to keep silent,” Murrow said, breaking the sound barrier of objectivity. “There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities.
He goes on to quote Murrow about who deserves blame for the anti-American actions of McCarthy: “And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right, ‘The fault dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ Good night, and good luck.”
We’re fast approaching climatic tipping points — the loss of Arctic sea ice, the disintegration of the great ice sheets, the release of vast amounts of carbon from the permafrost, Dust-Bowlification of much of the world’s arable land — that are catastrophic and irreversible on a time frame of centuries.
Leading Climate Scientists: ‘We Have A Global Emergency,’ Must Slash CO2 ASAPClimate CREDIT: AP/DENNIS COOK James Hansen and 18 leading climate experts have published a peer-reviewed version of…thinkprogress.orgEven once-reticent climatologists have been speaking out for years because, as Dr. Lonnie Thompson has written, “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.” Some climatologists, like James Hansen and Jason Box, have joined direct action and been arrested for it.
Scientists have been ratcheting up their warnings year after year as the dangers posed by unrestricted carbon pollution become more and more undeniably obvious. In response, international moral leaders, like Pope Francis, have built upon that ever-strengthening scientific understanding to argue that climate inaction is itself immoral.
Finally, in December every major country in the world unanimously agreed that the science was so solid it was time to commit to specific actions to cut carbon pollution — and that those actions would be ratcheted up every five years — in order to keep total global warming from preindustrial levels “well below 2°C” (3.6°F).
Trump’s climate science denial gets little attention from the Mainstream Media
Yet Donald Trump can proclaim the wackiest of anti-science climate denier talking points for months, and in 20 debates, the media asked him precisely zero questions about this greatest of all preventable threats to America. Trump proclaims “We’re going to cancel the Paris climate agreement” — humanity’s best if not only chance to avoid catastrophic irreversible climate change lasting 1000 years — and the media treats it as a one-day story if they cover it at all.
Trump’s Bizarre Climate Beliefs Would Jeopardize Meaningful Global Climate ActionClimate CREDIT: LM Otero, AP Donald Trump’s climate science denial and dubious deal-making skills just raised the…thinkprogress.orgConsider the Huffington Post itself, which has been better than 99 percent of major media outlets in terms of consistently explaining to the public the catastrophic risks posed by climate inaction — and better than 99 percent of major media outlets in terms of consistently explaining to the public the risks posed by a Trump presidency. Yet even HuffPost does not list Trump’s climate denial and his plan to block national and global climate action in the “Editor’s Note” they post at the end of every story on Donald Trump (emphasis in original):
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
So why does the media rightly denounce Trump’s racist statements but not his climate denial? What will be the explanation to future generations if we don’t devote the mere 0.06 percent of GDP per year that scientists and the world’s nations have agreed is all that is needed to avert multiple irreversible climate catastrophes lasting centuries — in part because the media failed to call out climate denial the way they are now calling out Trump’s racist statements?
I go back to a 2009 cover story on Paul Krugman by Newsweek’s Evan Thomas. He begins with the amazing admission — “If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am),” and continues with words that should be emblazoned across journalism schools around the country:
By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring. But sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice cracking. The in crowd of any age can be deceived by self-confidence….
Thomas was writing about the economic crisis, but his words apply far better to the global Ponzi scheme that is our current fossil-fuel-based economy. Indeed, his words could not more ironically apply to the catastrophic global warming that he and his establishment buddies are all but blind to — the sound of ice cracking in the Arctic, Greenland, and Antarctica.
Trump’s blatantly racist statements are a threat to the existing order, to the status quo enforced by the mainstream media, where — whatever a politician’s actual beliefs are — he or she can’t be (too) overtly racist, as Trump is. But it’s clear that (too) many in the media incorrectly perceive the economic and other changes needed to stop catastrophic climate change as a threat to the status quo, when in fact it is inaction on climate change that will destroy the status quo.
250 Faith Leaders Demand Nations Ratify Paris Climate DealClimate by Jeremy Deaton – Guest Contributor & CREDIT: Climate Nexus Former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres has…thinkprogress.orgAgain, to be clear, racism and denial are very different things. However, it’s worth noting that the Pope himself ended his 195-page climate encyclical calling on God to “Enlighten those who possess power and money that they may avoid the sin of indifference, that they may love the common good, advance the weak, and care for this world in which we live. The poor and the earth are crying out.”
If indifference to the dangers of climate inaction by the rich and powerful is a sin, just how immoral is it for a presidential candidate (and companies like ExxonMobil) to offer up lies and misinformation in order to spread indifference among the public, the media, and policy-makers? Just how immoral is it for a presidential candidate to actually campaign publicly on a plan to undo both national and international action on climate change?
Where is the media outrage?
I’ll end with the words of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass from 1857:
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
I don’t know if the climate crisis can be prevented in an era where so many leading GOP politicians are committed to blocking serious action and where much of the media is effectively an agent of the status quo rather than of the public interest. But I do know that Murrow’s words are as true today as they were 60 years ago: Those who keep silent on the great moral crisis of our time cannot escape responsibility for the grim result.