by On Monday, climate activists interrupted a taping of ABC’s daytime talk show, the viewwith Senator Ted Cruz, but they weren’t just there to protest the Texas Republican.
Alice Hu, a climate activist with the advocacy group New York Communities for Change (NYCC), stood up in the audience during the recording and criticized the network’s coverage of the climate crisis, which she considers insufficient.
“ABC needs to cover climate change more instead of featuring a climate denier like Ted Cruz,” she can be heard saying in the video.
The protesters were punished for the view host Whoopi Goldberg, who said “Let’s do our job.” They were eventually escorted out of the audience.
Ms. Hu said the independent that media coverage of the climate crisis is vitally important and often falls short of the standards she would like to see.
“How can someone be aware of the true scope of a problem if they don’t even know about the news they consume?” she said.
“Climate change is one of, if not the most important story of our time,” said Ms. Hu. “And the kind of sad, lukewarm reporting they’re doing is not up to date.”
During the protest, the view host Sunny Hostin noted on air that they cover the climate crisis.
But at the hearing, Ms Hu claimed that ABC spent less than six hours covering the climate crisis last year. She said the independent This figure comes from the left-leaning non-profit media watchdog Media Matters for America (MMFA).
In a March report, MMFA said ABC spent 323 minutes in 2021, roughly five and a half hours, discussing the climate crisis on morning, evening and Sunday shows.
That compares to about 6.5 hours on NBC and about 9.5 hours on CBS, the report says. In total, ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX spent about 22 hours discussing the climate crisis, which represented just over 1 percent of all coverage on these shows, it added.
the independent has reached out to all four networks for comment on the report. the independent also contacted a representative for Senator Cruz to comment on Monday’s protest.
A representative of the view saying the independent that three audience members were protesting the weather and were escorted out by security.
In 2021, the networks had significantly more weather coverage than in 2020, according to the MMFA report. But Ms Hu said opportunities were still being missed in some media coverage.
This summer, when the US experienced extreme weather events like heat waves, floods and droughts, ABC News didn’t always “connect the dots” between those events and the climate crisis or the fossil fuels that are largely responsible for the crisis. climate, he said.
The United Nations’ leading climate science panel has said that as the planet continues to warm, these types of extreme weather events are likely to become more common and more severe.
A growing number of climate attribution studies have also found that the climate shock contributed to the likelihood or severity of individual weather events such as storms or heat waves. Droughts this summer in North America were made 20 times more likely due to global warming, for example.
“The climate crisis has reached a point where it is very clear that asking politely through petitions and voting for certain candidates etc. is not enough to stop the rapid climate breakdown that we are experiencing around the world,” he said. Mrs Hu.
“For us, the media is a very important pillar in society to move and galvanize to cover more climate change,” he added.
