Greenwashing the News for Fun and Profit

If a prominent media outlet takes money from liberal philanthropies to report on "climate change," and then attributes all weather-related problems to that climate change, and never fact-checks how normal these weather phenomena actually are, what would you call that? Is it not the definition of corruption?

You'd also call it the new normal for the Associated Press – and several other outlets, all of which take funding from donors with agendas. Not surprisingly, they faithfully ascribe to "climate change" all manner of occurrence. In fact, it turns out that there are plenty of grants to go round if a media company wants to write about the climate.

Once upon a time in the newsroom, the "weather story" was generally assigned to the lowliest cub reporter, who would dutifully check the clips in the morgue and then compose her own variation on the hundreds of weather stories that had preceded the new one. "Largest snowfall in Frozen Elk, N.H. since 1986," or "hottest day in Fishburg since the summer of '42." 

Today, however the weather (however unchanged) is big news. According to Fox News, the AP “took $8 million in donations to fund climate coverage in 2022.” Fox was quoting from a year-end report called The Climate Fact Check Report 2022, put together by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the Heartland Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute, and the International Climate Science Coalition. It argued that climate alarmists and members of the media promulgated claims about the relationship between manmade emissions and natural disasters, “claims that clashed with reality and science.”

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The organizations paying for this “philanthropy-funded news” via climate grants, are the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Quadrivium, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation. An AP vice president is quoted as saying that they only accept money without strings attached. For what that's worth.

One AP article blamed climate change for flooding in Pakistan, Hurricane Ian, droughts in Europe, China, and Africa, as well as various heat waves. Heat waves in particular are always blamed on carbon emissions and the "climate change" they are said to create. That is the case even when the heat wave in question is well within the realm of normal heat waves for a country.

So ubiquitous is the ascription of all weather to climate change, that after recent devastating storms in California, the Los Angeles Times had to run a front page article on January 19th, stating that “Scientists cast doubt on storms link to climate change.” It went on to say that “as California emerges from a two-week bout of deadly atmospheric rivers, a number of climate researchers say the recent storms appear to be typical of the intense, periodic rains the state has experienced throughout its history, and not the result of global warming.” Shockingly, the report also blamed rugged topography and aging flood infrastructure, instead of “climate-altering greenhouse gas.”

Road closed ahead. Exit here.

The paper noted that many officials and other media had blamed the recent weather events on "climate change" but made the case that they were wrong. They quoted a scientist, Alexander Gershunov, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who said, “Assuming that these storms were driven by global warming would be like assuming an athlete who breaks a record was on steroids.” Gershunov warned that “a group I call ‘mediaologists’ always hype the current situation to make it seem worse than the last one." 

The story also quoted Mike Anderson, the official state climatologist for California, who suggested that the recent series of atmospheric rivers — long plumes of vapor that can pour over the West Coast — was a grim reminder that in a place so dry, sudden flooding can bring catastrophe. "Each of the recent atmospheric rivers were within the historical distribution of sizes of atmospheric rivers,” Anderson said. In the end, though, the Times couldn’t resist bringing ‘global warming’ into the picture. It quoted Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. “Most recent storm systems don’t hold a candle to the kinds of extreme prolonged storms of the last century. They do, however, point in the direction of the episodes of hydro-climate we can expect to see more of due to global warming.”

The LA Times remains a liberal paper. But it is apparently still capable of independent reporting from time to time. Sadly, though, this is an exception. They’re probably not on a foundation payroll. 

Another Fox Digital article on Jan. 5th, noted that the well-endowed, North Carolina-based 1 Earth Fund, works in tandem with many mainstream papers to "fund cost-effective communication projects that can reach audiences across the political divide." The group markets itself as a counter to "disinformation campaigns" funded by fossil fuel companies. The foundation website adds that it funds "projects like Connected Coastlines," a nationwide climate reporting initiative in coastal states overseen by the Pulitzer Center. The project's list of partners includes The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Seattle Times, and Orlando Sentinel.

There's always a "climate" story.

The goal is to build a nationwide consortium of newspapers and independent journalists to “report on the local effects of erratic weather patterns on coastal populations using the latest climate science," the Pulitzer Center states.” Such “science,” however, always ends up attributing weather events to imaginary "man-made climate change," regardless of what the facts actually demonstrate. 

The larger goal, of course, is to proselytize to readers, convincing them to buy into green-energy agendas and other policies formulated to fight "climate change." Considering how widespread and well-funded this reporting is, it’s easy to see how they’ve created a huge constituency for those policies. Expect more of the same.