How the corporate message is obfuscating climate coverage

David Sassoon, the founder and publisher of Inside Climate News, writes about how corporate messaging is interfering with the ability of journalists to deliver the message of their impact on the climate.

Sassoon writes, “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.”

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