'Covering Climate Now' and the Corrupt Corporate Media

Buck Throckmorton19 Apr, 2024 5 Min Read
Journalism, 2024

Recently here at The Pipeline, we took a dive into a radical organization called “Covering Climate Now” (“CCNow”) which has partnered with hundreds of media outlets to influence coverage of the "climate" panic. That piece covered the various “best practices” advocated by CCNow, which include policing fellow journalists, colluding with anti-carbon activists in reporting, inserting a "climate" angle to stories on every beat, making "climate" a social justice issue, and de-platforming any scientific voice that is not on board with the climate agenda.

Let's now take a look at ways in which media outlets -- and journalism itself -- have been corrupted by partnering with CCNow, whose practices run contrary to the ethical standards to which journalists once abided. Covering Climate Now proudly boasts of helping journalists “improve the caliber and prominence of their reporting through training, networking, collaboration, and more.” Who are CCNow’s media partners? They include NBC, ABC, CBS News, Reuters, Bloomberg, Time, and many more, including “scores of local and special interest publications.”

From Russia, with love.

In 2022, PBS stations across the country aired a special documentary titled “Burning Questions.” It was hosted by NBC journalists Savannah Sellers and Al Roker to spread CCNow’s propaganda “on a journey across the country and around the world to the frontlines of the climate crisis.” Featured in this fear-mongering production were numerous “objective” and “reputable” media organizations. While not the intent, this documentary neatly captured the depth of journalism’s corruption, and the breadth of the media’s intellectual capture in regards to “climate.”

Never before has reporting from so many major news organizations been brought together to tell the climate story. Journalists from the Guardian, Agence-France Presse, the Los Angeles Times, Sesame Workshop, Al Jazeera English, PBS NewsHour, TIME, Channel 4 (UK), the Post and Courier, and more take viewers behind the scenes, recounting the stories in their award-winning coverage and how they went about reporting them.

The year before, ABC (a Disney Entertainment subsidiary) had proudly announced its partnership with Covering Climate Now as it rolled out “Climate Crisis: Saving Tomorrow,” a month-long blitz of climate hysteria featuring a who’s who of ABC’s premier journalists, including David Muir, Martha Raddatz, Byron Pitts, Amy Robach, and many others. ABC News President Kim Godwin boasted about her entire team's repeating CCNow’s apocalyptic propaganda, stating “our global coverage across each and every continent, reporting on the stark reality of the earth’s dire condition and seeking the answers on how to create change now, reflects our dedication to shedding light on one of the most pressing issues of our time.” Now that's entertainment!

Whether you’re seeing blanket-the-airwaves productions such as that one at ABC, or the daily dose of “climate change’s impact on you” type of stories elsewhere, they probably have CCNow’s fingerprints on them. When CBS broadcast a feature titled “How Climate Change Threatens Pregnant Women and Their Fetuses” the show was produced in association with CCNow. In fact, it can still be accessed at CCNow’s website.

And the winner is...

Wherever you find a gaggle of left-wing activists, you’ll also find a group of people pretentiously giving awards to each other, so naturally, there are plenty of climate coverage awards being handed out to journalists of easy virtue spreading CCNow’s propaganda. Winners of the 2023 Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards include those “whose work has appeared on PBS’s Frontline, Bloomberg, VICE News, ProPublica/New York Times, Deutsche Welle, and Al Jazeera English — for rigorous investigative reports, eye-opening exposes of climate injustice, and much-needed analyses of climate solutions.”

Overseeing the awards is Kyle Pope, the former editor and publisher of the  Columbia Journalism Review, who recently left his post to become executive director of Covering Climate Now, which he co-founded in 2019 with Mark Hertsgaard -- the environment correspondent of the radical leftist magazine The Nation. In his farewell piece for CJR, Pope wrote:

How do you go about doing your work in the face of an audience that often seems not to care? How do you measure journalism that isn’t having the impact you want or expect?

The answer is that you do it anyway. Democracy is under siege, here and around the world. The climate emergency is upon us. Disinformation is a growing scourge. All of these issues are the focus of endless, fearless, and powerful reporting. And yet Trump, the anti-democracy candidate, is holding his own in most national polls, there’s too little public pressure on governments to change their approaches to energy and address the climate emergency, and the technology monopolies remain dominant.

Among his recommendations: "Cut remaining ties to Twitter/X, get out of your bunker, pay no attention to audience metrics, break from the media pack, remember that response to stories isn't personal." You can find his X feed here.

We've got you covered.

Because the role of modern journalism is to advocate and influence rather than engage in reporting, CCNow is already at work preparing its propaganda affiliates on how to influence news coverage for the rest of 2024. It will be reported as the hottest year on record – even though the measurements for the remaining 8 months have not even been taken yet: "Prepare Your Newsroom for 2024’s Extreme Heat"

Already, the conditions we’re seeing this year — from runaway ocean temperatures to unseasonable warmth on land — are a signal for journalists to prepare themselves and their audiences for what’s to come. Now is the time to ready your newsrooms to step up your climate coverage and bring accountability to local, regional, and national governments.

You may have noticed that there's an election coming up this year, so CCNow is also preparing its media allies on how to frame coverage with its "Climate Elections Project," which it describes as a "nonpartisan" effort to help journalists and newsrooms give climate change, and its solutions, the coverage it deserves in 2024 election coverage.

Addressing climate change in time requires a worldwide effort, at every level of government and society, but contrary to attempts to politicize the issue, climate change is not partisan — and neither is reporting on it.

Journalism has become Orwellian in its propaganda efforts. Advocating for the ruling regime is called non-partisan. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Life-giving carbon is lethal. And Net-Zero starvation is nutrition.

Even as it dies, corporate journalism is hopelessly corrupted. By officially aligning with the eco-socialists of Covering Climate Now, media institutions have made it unambiguously clear that they are pawns in the service of an anti-human, anti-civilizational agenda. Read -- or better yet, don't read -- them accordingly.

Buck Throckmorton is a writer ("co-blogger") at the Ace of Spades HQ blog. His career includes many years in banking and commercial lending, as well as a stint with an American auto manufacturer. Buck's writing often takes a critical look at electric vehicles, "green" energy, and woke capital. Twitter: @BuckThrockmort; email: buck.throckmorton@protonmail.com

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4 comments on “'Covering Climate Now' and the Corrupt Corporate Media”

  1. I use one of CCN's techniques for my own purposes: if the media inserts a climate change reference into an otherwise unrelated story, I simply automatically assume that the story is essentially a falsehood by association with the climate hoax.

  2. You have to (almost) feel bad for these "journalists." They are likely the most miserable people in the world. Imagine having such anxiety over this fiction of man made "climate change" and your daily life being consumed by non-stop apocalyptic thinking that you cannot contribute anything of value to the world. It is zealotry, a near religious devotion to a host of items that are provably false, yet continue to be promoted through the use of now-discredited media platforms. In essence, they are merely talking to each other, yet they don't fully realize it. Even if they did realize there's nobody listening other than fellow travelers, they'd keep doing it. It's a mental doom loop.

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