The Guardian is one of a handful of UK newsbrands that has signed up to a US-led initiative aiming to improve media coverage of climate change.
The Covering Climate Now project aims to “break the climate silence” that it claims “has long prevailed within too much of the news media”.
It wants to start a conversation among journalists about how all news outlets “can do justice to the defining story of our time”.
The project has been co-founded by weekly US news magazine The Nation and US news industry title the Columbia Journalism Review, in partnership with The Guardian.
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A total of 49 print and online newsbrands have signed up worldwide, including Huffpost, The Conversation and The Lancet in the UK.
No UK broadcasters have put their name to the project, but Channel 4 News chief correspondent Alex Thomson has signed up as an independent journalist.
In a joint statement, CJR editor Kyle Pope and Nation editor Mark Hertsgaard said: “We see Covering Climate Now as a fulfillment of journalism’s most sacred responsibilities, which are to inform people and foster constructive debate about common challenges and opportunities. Arguably, no problem in today’s world is more challenging, or offers brighter opportunities…
“To elevate climate coverage is no more of a value judgment than it is to sideline such coverage. For many years now, most of the news media, at least in the US, has done the latter.”
Press Gazette reported this week that more than 100 employees at Radio Times publisher Immediate Media have demanded their bosses stop carrying ads from oil and gas companies amid concern over the “growing climate crisis”.
Picture: Graeme Robertson
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