Communities of color most affected, least represented in climate change coverage

9th March 2020   ·   0 Comments

Because Evlondo Cooper was born and raised in New Orleans, he’s seen first-hand the debilitating, negative effects of climate change, air and water pollution, and chemical contamination can have communities of color, the poor and other underserved populations.

Devastating hurricanes, like Katrina in southeastern Louisiana and Harvey in eastern Texas, have ravaged Gulf Coast communities, while coastal erosion has slowly winnowed away land and waterways on which minority populations had been thriving.

The existence of “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana’s River Parishes, in which the corrosive byproducts belched from nearby chemical plants have devastated minorities and working-class populations living in the region, has been long-understood but only recently-exposed.

Cooper said that such personal experience has continually confirmed for him the existence and preponderance of environmental racism, in which neglect or abuse of the natural world disproportionately affects vulnerable, under-represented populations such as communities of color and the poor and working-class.

“Wherever you travel in Louisiana and in the country and visit communities of color, chances are you’re going to find some sort of environmental racism,” Cooper told The Louisiana Weekly recently.

But unfortunately, he said, the voices of the victims of such negative forces are rarely voiced in American media, with few commentators who are people of color, and even fewer interviews with citizens across the country affected by cases like Cancer Alley and Hurricane Katrina. When it comes to climate change and its disproportionately negative impact of vulnerable populations, he said, the media can frequently lack the diversity needed to view environmental degradation as a truly global problem.

“We know the corporate networks ignore these voices,” said Cooper, who now represents Media Matters for America’s climate and energy team, “despite the fact that communities of color are harmed by environmental racism. But we don’t know why the silence is so stark.”

While the root causes of this trend are still being uncovered, Media Matters recently found quantitative evidence of this journalistic dereliction. The organization studied the content in 2019 of the three traditional networks – ABC, NBC and CBS – and found that only 10 percent of guests or commentators featured in the networks’ climate change coverage were people of color.

In addition, only 27 percent of the experts interviewed by the networks about climate change were women. The study also found that qualified scientists and climate-change activists were severely underrepresented in the coverage.

The results of the study, which also included the content of PBS NewsHour and the Fox Network’s syndicate Sunday morning news program, were released by Media Matters late last month.

To underscore the overall abysmal amount of climate change coverage by the outlets studied, less than one percent of total news content focused on climate change. When the significantly larger amount of climate-change coverage featured by PBS NewsHour – the public broadcasting network ran more segments on the subjects than ABC, NBC and CBS combined – is removed, and when the absence of diversity in network coverage is applied, the picture is particularly dismal. But Cooper said the study results weren’t a big shock. He said network news coverage is driven by shareholders and by the audience.

“Corporate networks have five million viewers a night, and they kind of set the agenda,” Cooper told The Louisiana Weekly. Other Media Matters executives had similar thoughts.

“In 2019, the climate crisis drove young people into the streets, shaped the Democratic primary, and nearly burned an entire continent to the ground, and that is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Allison Fisher, Media Matters’ climate and energy program director, in a press release. “Everyday in every corner of the globe, climate stories both hopeful and horrifying are unfolding. It’s time for broadcast news to start telling these stories.

“Broadcast news climate coverage suffered in 2019 because programs excluded the voices of those who understand the most about climate change and who are experiencing the worst of its impact,” she added. “This is why scientists, women, and people of color must play a larger role in national discussions around climate.”

Such emphases resonate in south Louisiana, said Dr. Beverly Wright, executive director of the New Orleans-based Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, an organization dedicated to establishing a just and healthy environment in the Gulf Coast region. She said the results of the Media Matters survey aren’t surprising in Louisiana and the southern states, where environmental racism often permeates the environmental and social reality.

When environmental disasters strike, Wright said, “the first to be hit, and hit hard, especially in the South, are African Americans.” She added that “the media is controlled by who owns it,” which, she said, usually isn’t people from underserved communities.

“Climate change is not a ‘sexy’ subject,” she said, “so it doesn’t get much coverage.” She said that can give the illusion “that people don’t care about [climate change], a stereotype frequently and unfairly placed on people of color.

“The media needs to know that climate change affects all of society,” she said, not just white or upper-class communities.

“Whenever you see [underrepresented] communities that are devastated, that are constantly asking for help, “ Wright said, “it’s reflective of the social structure we have, particularly down South. This is just a continuation of [the racism] that Black people already know.”

Mainstream obliviousness to the environmental challenges facing communities of color, she added, often leads to climate change eventually affecting the very people who own the media, present the news – and ignore diverse voices.

“If it’s hitting us now,” Wright said, “it’s on its way to you.”

Cooper noted several ways in which the mainstream media can broaden the demographics it features and speaks to when it comes to climate change coverage. One, he said, is for the media to acknowledge their poor representation of diverse voices, and to then reach out to organizations that can assist journalists in enriching their environmental coverage.

“Now that we’re highlighting this discrepancy, the networks need to show they can work with partners in several communities to get a better picture of the environmental landscape,” he said, “so people can get the information they need to make an informed decision.”

He added that the work of numerous environmental advocacy groups and climate change activists have continued to press forward with their efforts to inform the public and spur change, including the issue of environmental justice. Cooper said several such organizations in Louisiana specifically have made steady progress regionally.

Finally, Cooper said the need for more complete, inclusive climate change coverage has been heightened during the current presidential election year, and as the current White House administration has expressed significant skepticism about the issue and severely rolled back many of the positive policy advancements of earlier administrations.

The media must put political candidates’ feet to the proverbial fire when it comes to climate change in general, and in particular how environmental policy can affect communities of color or poorer populations.

Candidates, as well as the general population, need to realize that people of color care deeply about climate change, largely because it’s such underserved communities that often suffer from environmental developments. Cooper said that while each of the major candidates has released some form of environmental policy and climate change initiatives, tough questions still need to be posed to politicians.

Mark Hertsgaard, executive director of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative aimed at improving climate change coverage, reinforced such thoughts in the Media Matters press release on the study.

“The United States has a president whose climate preparedness policy is, to quote one of his tweets, ‘Get your mops and buckets ready!’” Hertsgaard said.

“Given the stakes, the climate crisis simply must be a central part of the media’s 2020 campaign coverage,” he added. “The 400-plus news outlet partners in Covering Climate Now are committed to doing our part, and we hope our colleagues throughout the media will do likewise.”

The DSCEJ’s Wright noted that current Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, for his part, was one of the first politicians to realize that the River Parishes’ Cancer Alley did exist, and that it needed to be addressed.

Beyond such small gains, she added, the media must stress the universality of the rising devastation of climate change to all people.

“They have to get the message out that everyone is affected by this,” she said, “that everyone needs to care.”

This article originally published in the March 9, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.