Media Matters’ Evlondo Cooper joins The Climate Pod to discuss why and how national TV news can improve its climate justice coverage
Cooper: “What do we as Western countries, as rich Western countries, owe these other countries that have not contributed to climate change or benefited from the fossil fuel economy as much as we have?”
Published
Full Episode here.
The Climate Pod -- January 19, 2023
Citation From the January 19, 2023, episode of The Climate Pod
BROCK BENEFIEL (HOST): Time and time again, whenever there's extreme weather, we see the disproportionate impacts of the climate crisis, right? We know this is not evenly distributed in the United States and certainly not evenly distributed around the world. Evlondo, one of the biggest news stories in 2022 was the historic flooding in Pakistan. And we saw in the climate community, in climate media, I think it was very well covered and there was a lot of good stories that came out about that. But I wonder what people who don't follow this stuff every single day were exposed to, right? When you looked at this, how was it covered here in the United States from the media you reviewed?
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EVLONDO COOPER (SENIOR RESEARCHER, MEDIA MATTERS): Regarding Pakistan, what we saw — and this is something Yessenia [Funes] and I actually talked about last year — because American media doesn't usually report on non-Western climate impacts, the fact that it received the amount of reporting that it did was kind of a win. It was a slight improvement on coverage of other extreme weather events in other parts of the world previously. But again, many of the climate mentions were just kind of brief statements about how global warming contributed to the devastating flooding without the kind of in-depth reporting that people needed and that can contextualize just how interconnected these events are.
One thing we did see in some of the better segments, especially that what we saw in CNN and MSNBC, was the introduction of the idea to American audiences that a lot of the countries that are having the disproportionate harms from extreme weather events driven by climate change are countries that have contributed the least to global warming. And it also introduced the idea of climate reparations, which is something the U.N. has been trying to work on. And it's very controversial for a lot of reasons, but that was, I think, the one standout of the Pakistan coverage was that it did introduce American audiences to these new concepts that every country that’s being harmed right now has not equally played a role in driving the climate crisis. And what do we as Western countries, as rich Western countries, owe these other countries that have not contributed to climate change or benefited from the fossil fuel economy as much as we have, but are suffering disproportionate impacts?