News organizations turn spotlight on climate change
Tuesday marks World News Day, and it’s fitting that this year’s theme is an issue that touches every corner of the globe.
That theme is climate change, an issue that, like the pandemic, is a global crisis that will require a collective effort to tackle.
The event is organized by the World Editors Forum and the Canadian Journalism Foundation (CJF). It brings together more than 300 news organizations, including the Star, to underscore that “credible journalism matters if people are to make informed decisions about our planet’s future.”
“Clearly journalists have the responsibility here to shine a light on the climate change issues and to help our readers understand this is a crisis. This is something that matters to the future of the planet,” said Kathy English, a former public editor at the Star who serves as chair of the CJF.
Even as we continue to cope with the pandemic, this event underscores that we can’t forget that other critical issues demand attention, too. Indeed, we’ve just come through an election where issues other than the pandemic were debated — matters such as child care, the economy, foreign policy and gun control.
In that campaign, each party’s approach to climate change was also debated and in the end, likely swayed votes.
English notes parallels between climate change and the pandemic. They are globally intertwined and represent a collective challenge. Both have far-reaching impacts on our individual lives, national economies and social fabric.
“Some of the things we found we have to confront around the pandemic will be even bigger issues around climate change,” she said. That extends to those who deny there’s a problem at all, “the reluctance in some quarters to accept the reality, to accept the facts,” English said. “Both of these are issues that require fact-based journalism, journalism that gets to the verified information.”
Indeed, just as we have relied on journalists to deliver trusted information through the pandemic, that same mission is equally vital on climate change for the discussions, debates and policy decisions ahead. Informing those debates — as with all policy — is at the core of public service journalism.
There’s a message here for newsrooms, too, English notes. Climate change is no longer an issue reserved solely for the environment reporter.
“Climate change is going to cut across the whole swath of the newsroom — every beat, everything we do. It’s a business story, it’s a science story, it’s a local story … really trying to help people understand the implications of climate change in all of these beats, all of these areas we report on is important,” she said.
As we reflect on the value of trusted news, I think it’s important to highlight, again, that the journalists who deliver that news are increasingly the target of hateful vitriol.
I have written on the topic before about how such abuse disproportionately targets women journalists and journalists of colour with horrid racial and misogynistic slurs. A UNESCO report underscored how women journalists are harassed online in deliberate campaigns to demean, intimidate and silence their voices.
Yet, the problem seems to be getting worse. Three times since August, the Star has gone to police concerning death threats against its journalists or the people they write about.
Over the past month, the combination of the federal election and increasing worries about the Delta variant — and the measures to deal with it — seem to have sparked new levels of online harassment and abuse.
Star journalists will tell you that writing on almost any aspect of the pandemic, such as vaccine passports or public health measures, triggers an onslaught of hateful responses that arrive via emails, tweets, Facebook posts and telephone messages.
“It rolls in like the tide every time I write about vaccine passports,” one journalist told me as he passed along one particularly profane email.
This abuse cannot be dismissed as a routine reality of the job. It has increased in its frequency and vitriol. It has real effects on the mental wellbeing of journalists, pushes them to withdraw from public platforms and brings a chill to public discourse. Whatever your views on a particular issue or opinion, we all benefit from the work journalists do to hold our institutions and the powerful to account. We all lose when this work is lost or diminished.
Social media platforms need to take greater responsibility for the abusive content that takes aim at journalists. To that end, the Star has been working with Facebook to foster a more proactive approach. The company’s engagement is encouraging, but the real test is whether such content is taken down and if repeat offenders face consequences, like removal from the platform.
None of this is acceptable, not by any measure of civic — and civil — discourse.
Bruce Campion-Smith is the Star’s public editor and based in