Climate News vs Mainstream News
By Kiah Ronaldson, Account Executive
In our line of work, it’s important for us to have our finger on the pulse in relation to current affairs. This means our team consistently offer one another thorough updates on what we’ve seen in the media, our thoughts on it, and what it means to our business. Our Monday meetings are often tangential, discussing the minutia of a brand’s social media tactic or a recent article that struck a chord with one of us.
One thing that has cropped up in discussion for us recently is where the Climate Crisis falls within mainstream media. As a business, we aim to consume as much climate news as possible and encourage one another to accumulate knowledge and share new findings so that we can try to remain clued-in to what we can do as a communications agency to help. And while those efforts deliver small-scale results within our bubble, we’ve begun to question how big an impact climate news can make when something else is generally “front-page” news instead, so to speak.
A recent interview on The Nine O’Clock Show on Radio 1 with Oliver Callan sparked our attention and seemed relevant to this topic. Oisin Coghlan, the Director of Friends of the Earth – a community focused on enacting positive climate change, spoke on Al Gore’s 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”. He mentions how the film saw a massive breakthrough in raising climate awareness at a time when the concept of the Climate Crisis had a more niche activist audience. This breakthrough in awareness was quickly overtaken by the 2008 financial crisis, when people became more concerned about the “immediate threat” of recession. And while this was the completely natural and correct response, it meant that progress in raising climate awareness slowed and became a less prominent issue. Now, 20 years after the release of this documentary, we are in the midst of seeing the real effects of Climate Change. From the wildfires in Greece and Maui, to the mudslide in China, even to our wettest Summer on record here in Ireland. These are no longer examples of extreme weather, but the clear signifiers that we are further along in the Climate Crisis than ever before.
Focusing wholly on these issues in media must seem impossible. There is a deluge of bad climate news, and rarely is there a glimmer of hope to offer people that highlights positive change. As an audience to this news, it can be easy to switch off and retain only top-line information as a form of self-preservation from that feeling of dread that accompanies being climate conscious. This is when we see information on the Climate Crisis being swept away in the news cycle to become muddled in amongst the other headlines. One such example of this was during the recent press tour for the acclaimed films “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer”, which took over news cycles, social media trends, and seemed to be omnipresent in the lead up to the dual release. At this time, we were seeing reports on how we were experiencing the wettest July on record, and that hottest temperatures yet were recorded in Ireland. This information seemed to generate a small buzz, but eased into the background comparatively to the big budget marketing campaigns and buckets of millennial pink which were doing the rounds.
This is no one’s fault. It’s not the fault of the journalists, the filmmakers, or marketers. In a sense, everyone is just aiming to successfully execute their jobs. What we need to see happen is more awareness of actions that can be taken as a Climate Activist, and a larger push for everyone to consume as much Climate News as they can within the everyday news cycle. We need to see extreme weather being discussed as part of the wider issue of the Climate Crisis and not just as freak incidents. Discussing the Climate should become as common as any topic and should feature regularly as discussion points for the likes of presenters like Oliver Callan. By involving climate activists like Oisin Coghlan, he is spreading Climate information to those who may not necessarily be up to date with their knowledge of the crisis. Even the likes of Friends of the Earth have a “Cuppa for Climate” initiative that is aiming to create positive conversations around the Climate Crisis and for people to feel supported in their own Climate journey, whilst raising awareness of how we as a collective can truly enact change. You can fill out the form to host one of the events here.
These small actions can help bridge the vast canyon of information that separates the climate conscious from those who may not be as aware of this news. It’s important that we try to teach people that there is positive change, and that not all Climate news has to be bad news. There are people looking at the Crisis with positivity and a mentality that real change can be enacted through community and governmental engagement. It really is no one’s fault that news about the Climate Crisis can often be ousted from of the headlines for more favourable topics, but it’s everybody’s job to keep learning as much as they can, and to ensure that Climate News is always Mainstream News.