How Journalists Can Stand Up to Trump's Bluster

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How Journalists Can Stand Up to Trump’s Bluster
Newsroom layoffs make it harder, but reporters must keep telling the truth about climate change.

Mark Hertsgaard
The Nation


It’s a tumultuous time for climate journalists, and not only because the current president and an unelected billionaire are running roughshod over US law, attacking NOAA and the Environmental Protection Agency, and installing climate deniers across the federal bureaucracy. Even as the Los Angeles fires and a rapidly melting Arctic all but scream that climate breakdown is worsening, some of the most accomplished journalists on the climate beat have had their jobs threatened or eliminated. “We need the press to be at its best now,” media analyst Margaret Sullivan wrote on Substack. But it’s hard to do our best when newsroom staffs are shrinking and owners are kowtowing to the White House.

A massive round of layoffs at CNN ousted Rachel Ramirez, a reporter whose coverage has demonstrated the expansiveness of the climate beat and who won a Covering Climate Now Journalist of the Year Award in 2024. Cost-cutting at CBS News claimed the jobs of Ben Tracy, formerly the senior climate and environment correspondent, and his colleague, producer Chris Spinder—finalists in the 2023 CCNow Awards. Allen Media announced that it was firing meteorologists at nearly two dozen local TV stations it owns; instead, local weather reports would be supplied from distant Atlanta. Outcry from viewers at WTVA in Mississippi and elsewhere led Allen to rescind that order—for now.

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Meanwhile, Ezra Klein’s latest New York Times column offers insight into how journalists can avoid being overwhelmed by the Trump-Musk blitzkrieg. Citing former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Klein noted that Trump’s media strategy has long been to throw so many outlandish statements into the public sphere that it’s hard to keep up. “People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media,” Klein wrote. “If you overwhelm the media—if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next… it is hard to even think coherently.”

Trump’s plan, Klein argues, “is to play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king…. That can only happen if we believe him.” ............(more)

https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/trump-journalism-climate-newsrooms/