I would suggest anyone interested in the topic go directly to the source material here . which imo offers a much more interesting and nuanced take in the same plain english as the article itself without any of the clickbait.
Comments like this is why I don’t spend much time here anymore. Particularly how popular it is.
The article is fairly short and straightfoward.
It’s just a few short paragraphs before it shows a graphic indicating only 9% of 2023 articles made a connection to the burning of fossil fuels
Then they mention the 2024 number and the 2025 numbers.
During my recent interview with The Breach podcast, host Desmond Cole shared the results of the outlet’s informal review of 59 CBC stories during recent wildfire coverage. Only seven mentioned climate change, global warming or fossil fuels and most of those mentions came from interviewees rather than CBC journalists.
Posting a couple links from CBC in no way disputes the findings from the article. I don’t even think this person read the damn thing.
What are you expecting? CBC to come out and say “again our country goes up in flames as Irving and enbridge profit” - that isn’t journalism and they don’t need the legal hassle.
It is very clear in CBC coverage that climate change which includes fossil fuel consumption is driving this.
When I read those graphs, I come to slightly different impressions.
First, I am glad such a small number referenced individual actions. Those are typically just greenwashing propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. Policy will effect our emissions, not shopping or hair shirts.
Second, less than half the climate items were about extreme weather? I guess they just looped regular agriculture under climate items. Fine, but not concerned they wouldn’t go big picture on every story.
Last, I think the average CBC viewer isn’t likely to be a full on climate denier. Those people have their own media bubble. The bigger concern are the middle-road non-committed folk who understand it exists, but fall for the two cop-outs: its not human-caused, or there’s nothing that can be done about it. The fossil fuel link being missed from so many stories is my biggest concern.
This one doesn’t: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/wildfire-smoke-health-effects-how-to-protect-air-quality-9.7297727
Nor this one: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bradley-creek-evacuee-wildfire-9.7297911
This one? Nope. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/spokane-washington-wildfires-9.7297896
This one really seems like it should, but it doesn’t: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/south-korea-heatwave-9.7296123
Personally, when I’m reading an article, I skim past the parts that explain climate change, unless it has some new bit of information (ex. updates to historical trends). It’s not because I doubt climate change, but because I’m pretty familiar with the core points already.
I think it is helpful to talk about it in longer articles where you have room to dive into the topic, and put the current topic into a relevant wider context. However, I don’t think we should require it for the sake of mentioning it. It’s not effective at changing minds when its done like that.
I agree that the last article should have included the wider context. I would also be concerned if there is a growing pattern of not mentioning it when it needs to be. On this last point, while it’s more difficult, I would prefer if they analyzed sentiment and phrasing rather than counting mentions.
Dang it, of course I’d post in the wrong spot. For the record, this was a copy of the other reply, not the one I mentioned not posting.
I’m not sure there are good journalistic practice’s for this yet. It takes space to properly cite that climate scientists have said that climate change has increased the intensity and frequency of these fires. Awkward too. I would like to see it settled that in short news articles, it is sufficiently settled science to simply use phrases like “climate change exacerbated wildfires” - but unfortunately, editors are still afraid of being accused of editoralizing.
Which is insane, as there are plenty of the conclusions of economists that get worked into the language without question, on far thinner support. Edit: or even pseudo-economists - I am thinking of the regular, unexplained language that equates a nations spending with a household budget, for example. That can be slipped in undefended no problem.
It’s not effective at changing minds when it’s done like that.
I had a rather lengthy response to Otter – then I read their post more carefully, so you get one even longer. 🙄 This is why I normally lurk. Moderation is not my strength.
Propaganda is absolutely effective, but only significantly so when measured, diverse, and subtle, at least until already enjoying widespread majority support. The tactics that work involve obscuring bias or position behind oblique or selective framing. Bludgeoning people with facts tends to be counter-productive, even alienating people who already share the same views. That means the data was incorrectly measured, with a bias toward checking boxes/signaling virtue rather than actually exerting influence.
And there lies the deeper problem as well. How does one form “good journalistic practice” around such manipulative presentation of information, when that is partly how we define bad journalistic practice? Honesty/diligence and effectiveness are directly at odds with one another, and that’s pretty hard to coherently codify. If you can’t always be objectively right, then you have to always be honest and transparent – to not exert influence that is not intrinsic to incontrovertible facts. And what today is ever incontrovertible to a general audience?
Journalism as a craft desperately needs the institutional trust it only ever earned by policing itself against such practices, so that it could leverage a trust that those who engage in more effective manipulations could not. And that didn’t even protect the truth nearly so much as it did the status quo and established beliefs. The reality is we always needed critical thinking that has to come from somewhere greater in breadth and capacity than our own imagination, intuition, or narrow experience could ever train.
When the walls around publishing collapsed, we lost the good with the bad. I don’t think the solution we need today can still (pretend to) exist within journalism/institutions, nor with a purely self-organized general public. Today, I find democratized aggregators like Lemmy helpful, but the quality is a direct consequence of its limited influence also limiting the incentive to subvert it. Even then it’s only a relative boost to signal quality, not a new kind of signal.
A new mechanism is needed to filter and direct trust irrespective of subject – perhaps as educational institutions once did to greater degree. If we don’t figure it out soon, AI will create that solution for
usits creator-owners by becoming the substrate through which all human knowledge gets filtered and approximately summarized. We’ve likely already met the next Rupert Murdoch.
Both articles were published August 6th, think it’s fair to give OP’s article the benefit of the doubt.
eh, got me there. Nearly identical to OP’s article just slight differences.
CBC covers climate change almost every day. And reasonably well.
Climate change deniers don’t consume CBC media. So they don’t need to spoon feed the cause to their audience at every turn.
CBC has a huge fear of being controversial, which given extremes that pass for normal these days, and it results in the softening of anything that migh stir the hornet’s nest.
I get the criticism, but it also over assumes the CBC’s influence. We all have “the context [we] need to understand the crisis”, some choose ignorance. The CBC can’t fix that.
It’s a national past time to criticise the CBC. While, for the past couple decades, it has also been CBCs habit to over-react to being called left leaning to hire right wing appologisys for Bay street.
They havnt figured out that the sole national public broadcaster in a country otherwise entirely dominated by billionaire oligarch (and increasingly, American billionaire oligarch) owned media, should probably find its self reporting with a different perspective than its peers.
No, its the Canadians that are wrong. CTV and CBC reporting should look about the same or it’s CBC that is biased. /s
@NightOwl They have. It’s a combination of very combustible fuel because of low water levels due to drought (climate change), years of extinguishing fires that would naturally cull the forest of fuel but not cause harm to big trees, the ban on Indigenous cultural burning used to protect forests and communities AND monoculture forests created by post-logging tree planting. You just need to listen consistently to lots of shows and over time the interviews stack up and you get the big picture.
I mean, I’ve seen this a lot. It’s climate change. Probably because I’m kinda close to it?
Hard to miss here, honestly.
Hey OP post this in Buy Canadian.
We supported them, even paid for subscriptions out of principle.
I think it’s time we did our thing.
