In his 2009 paper Worst-Case Scenarios, Harvard professor Cass Sunstein coined the term the “Goldstein Effect” to describe a government’s “ability to intensify public concern, by giving a definite face to the adversary, specifying a human source of the underlying threat.” His basic argument was that in the instance of the “War on Terror,” the US government had Osama Bin Laden and his steady stream video messages. Selling the Iraq War, the Bush administration, obviously, had Saddam Hussein. The term came from Emmanuel Goldstein, the mysterious Party villain and counter-revolutionary in Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Bad Guys, in other words, need a human face for the public to care about a threat. And climate change, unlike the war on terror or other real wars, by its very nature, has no singular villain, nothing the public can put a literal face to. And this, Sunstein argued, is one of the primary barriers to get the public to truly care, on a visceral and real level, about pending climate chaos.
The headlines should, at least occasionally, read “Human-Caused Climate Change Fuels Another Disaster With LA Fires, not just a stream of “LA Fires Grip Nation.”
The reality, of course, is climate change does have villains, with an “s.” The line of demarcation isn’t neat and clean, but, broadly speaking, it’s fossil fuel executives, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and media propagandists, and the private equity and hedge funds that fund them. And there are faces of the victims as well: the climate refugees in the Global South who are already suffering mass displacement whose numbers are expected to reach as high as 1.2 billion by 2050, those subject to increasing flash floods, fires, hurricanes, and tsunamis. A demographic that––despite what Serious Centrist Pundits Insist––increasingly includes Americans.
That climate change directly causes more frequent and more severe wildfires is no longer in dispute. A 2022 United Nations report concluded that the risk of wildfires around the world will surge as climate change intensifies. “The heating of the planet is turning landscapes into tinderboxes, while more extreme weather means stronger, hotter, drier winds to fan the flames,” states the report, produced by 50 researchers from six continents.
Media coverage of these sensationalist events almost never connects the dots. A survey of Nightly News coverage from the first full day of the LA fires showed that, in 16 minutes of coverage ABC, NBC, and CBS nightly news broadcasts did not mention climate change once. In their Wednesday morning coverage of the LA fires, neither the New York Times Daily podcast nor the New York Times Morning Newsletter addressed climate change at all. The Daily had a single throwaway mention but didn’t actually talk about it, and the newsletter just ignored it. One can see dozens and dozens of examples of lurid coverage of the LA Wildfires—and other extreme weather events—in US media that doesn’t mention climate change at all or relegates it to a throwaway line.
Many of these outlets do sometimes have separate articles about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. But they’re typically relegated to “science” stories isolated from the original, far more impactful reporting of the human tragedy unfolding before our eyes.
Climate change-fueled extreme weather disasters overseas are typically ignored or downplayed altogether. A survey of two weeks of coverage from April 15 to 29—when the 2022 heat wave in India and Pakistan was at its most acute and newsworthy,ultimately killing almost 100—showed that it was ignored entirely by CNN’s primetime news programs: The Lead with Jake Tapper, The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, and Anderson Cooper 360°. The heat wave was also entirely ignored by NBC News (Today, Nightly News with Lester Holt, and Meet the Press), CBS News (Evening News, Sunday Morning News, and CBS Mornings), and ABC News (Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week With George Stephanopoulos). By way of comparison, a survey of the same news programs from the week of May 30 to June 6 showed almost 2.5 hours of coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s Jubilee, a holiday in the United Kingdom celebrating the 70th anniversary of her coronation.
To be clear, many of these outlets do sometimes have separate articles about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. But they’re typically relegated to “science” stories isolated from the original, far more impactful reporting of the human tragedy unfolding before our eyes. They read more like liberal box-checking than a fundamental feature of how these stories are covered. Severe weather events, when they’re reported on at all (typically because they’re within the US) are indexed in the “Oh, Dearism” genre of reporting, where politics and human decision making are stripped away entirely, and all one can do is look on helplessly and say “Oh, Dear.” There’s no villain, victims but no victimizer, no political actors or politics at all, and—above all—no explicit or implicit call to action. Just agency-free human suffering that may sorta kinda be linked to erratic weather patterns, with no sense there’s anything the viewer or reader can actually do about it. It’s just vaguely sad and everyone is expected to chip in a few dollars to GoFundMe, gawk at the suffering, and move on to the next extreme weather event right around the corner in a matter of weeks. Nothing is ever part of a pattern, a broader human-driven context. The headlines should, at least occasionally, read “Human-Caused Climate Change Fuels Another Disaster With LA Fires, not just a stream of “LA Fires Grip Nation.”
Newsrooms are still neatly delineating the human story and the “science” story, when these are one and the same.
If one accepts the basic tenets of the scientific consensus around climate change, that we more or less have a decade to radically alter course, then why wouldn’t our media outlets be more clear about the causes of the suffering, and what forces would have to be curtailed to practically do so? In March 2023 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released another damning report, authored by 93 experts, which found that the Earth’s average temperatures are likely on pace to rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels by the first half of the 2030s. This shift would surpass a climate threshold, they argue, which will unleash unprecedented flooding, heat waves, megastorms, and famines that could very well threaten all of human civilization. The only chance we have to avoid this extremely plausible scenario is for rich nations to immediately slash their greenhouse emissions and do so right away.
Newsrooms are still neatly delineating the human story and the “science” story, when these are one and the same. Without centering the scientific explanation of the why—which is to say, the cause of the human suffering on display—journalism is just emotional pornography. We can’t cover school shootings without centering lawmakers who defend and take large sums of cash from gunmakers. We can’t cover mass death in Gaza without centering Israel and the White House’s central role in causing it. And we can’t cover extreme weather events without centering climate change, and the fossil execs and their media and political organs that fuel it. To do so is to take politics out of what is inherently political, to only show a small slice of a much larger and richer story. If US media won’t permit its viewers to put a face to the villain of extreme weather––and in the wake of media anger over Luigi Magione’s online popularity, this will almost certainly never happen––they can at least permit its viewers to put a face to its victims. On a negligent, massive scale, they are still failing to do so.
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