When it comes to the argument over climate change, or, to be precise, the amount of effect human activities have on the climate, it seems like the panic-mongers are losing some ground. The Trump administration has been ignoring their outcries, the pearl-clutching predictions of scolds from Paul Erlich to Al Gore to John Kerry to Greta Thunberg have all failed to materialize, and people are just tired of the nonsense. What's more, people are learning about the facts behind this issue; facts like the Earth's history, how it has generally been warmer than it is now throughout the 4.6-billion-year lifespan of this planet, and how it is the height of human hubris to assume we know what the planet's "correct" temperature is.
I'd like to take some small credit for that, by the way.
So when we see a major legacy media outlet, currently in the throes of a reorganization, firing its entire "climate desk," we should take it as a good sign.
The great tragedy of our time, at least to those who dwell in the climate-alarmist press, is not hurricanes, floods, or famine—but a network trimming its propaganda department. When CBS News laid off most of its “climate crisis” staff, the media class responded as though free speech itself had been outlawed. According to Truthout, “CBS News has fired most of its climate crisis production staff” and, in the process, “gutted” its sacred climate desk. The story was dressed up as an obituary for truth itself, complete with talk of “bloodbaths” and “new conservative management”.
To anyone outside the activist echo chamber, it looked like a normal corporate reshuffling. CBS’s parent company had merged with Skydance, and the incoming leadership did what executives always do after mergers—trim redundancies, change direction, and try to make the business profitable again. But to those who had mistaken climate coverage for a holy mission, this was blasphemy.
Well, let's be honest about this: A good part of it is, probably, a typical corporate reshuffling. I've been through a few of these things, mergers, acquisitions, and so on. In fact, in my years as a corporate consultant, I was actually intimately involved in a few mergers and acquisitions, from Boston to Silicon Valley. Eliminating redundancies is not only routine, it actually makes good sense.
But so does another standard practice: Getting rid of dead wood.
At the heart of the melodrama was Tracy Wholf, the now-former head of CBS’s climate desk, who had urged colleagues to insert a line into hurricane coverage reading: “The above-average Atlantic Ocean temperatures, made worse by climate change, helped Melissa rapidly intensify into a category 5 storm.” That suggestion was presented in Truthout as “accurate reporting.” In reality, it was speculative editorializing—a sentence of moral certainty grafted onto a story about weather.
This small episode tells a much larger story about what has happened to journalism. A decade or two ago, environmental reporting was about inquiry—asking questions, weighing data, distinguishing between what’s known and what’s conjecture. Today, it’s about ritual. Every storm, drought, or wildfire must include the catechismal line that it was “made worse by climate change.” It doesn’t matter that the claim is rarely quantifiable and often contested. The purpose isn’t to inform; it’s to reassure the faithful that the narrative still holds.
I'd like to think that's why the climate desk was shut down: The new team recognizes shoddy reporting when they see it.
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CBS's climate desk and the similar operations in other legacy media outlets have been doing this for years. They certainly aren't doing science reporting. They rarely, if ever, even mention the raw data. They never present the presumptions on which that data was analyzed. They don't inform, they proselytize. They don't report facts. They don't even seem to understand the proper perspective of this issue, of how laughably naive it is to take 50 or 100 years of human history and ignore the previous 4.6 billion years. They certainly don't seem to understand how vast, how complex, and how chaotic Earth's global climate is, or how puny our efforts are by comparison.
This isn't reporting. It's not journalism. It's propagandizing.
Now, the other thing that has happened at CBS is that they have a new Editor-in-Chief, Bari Weiss, who, while she isn't a hardcore conservative, nor is she a "woke" agitator or climate scold. She came to be where she is in no small part by calling out leftist propagandizing in the legacy media, even naming her employer at the time, the New York Times. What her stand is on losing CBS's climate desk, and what her direct involvement may have been, we don't know. But we do know that she intends to bring CBS back to straight reporting, to stating the facts as seen, and that's a righteous and hopeful goal.
That, and the closing of the climate desk, may well set CBS on a better path. The other legacy media organizations should be paying attention to what CBS is doing right now, and seek to emulate it in the very near future.
Facts matter. It's about time the legacy media learned that.
