The Guardian has decided as an institution to put climate change front and center in its journalism. Alan Rusbridger, who’s stepping down as the organization’s top editor this summer, put it this way in an editorial:

So, in the time left to me as editor, I thought I would try to harness the Guardian’s best resources to describe what is happening and what – if we do nothing – is almost certain to occur, a future that one distinguished scientist has termed as “incompatible with any reasonable characterisation of an organised, equitable and civilised global community”.

This is what journalism needs to be, and what it needs to do: Stand for something and then put all available resources behind making it happen. This couldn’t be further from the false neutrality of so much modern “journalism.” Nor could it be more important to make a more common practice.

In my last book, Mediactive, I made a list of what I thought news organizations should do in this digital age when the competition for people’s attention has never been greater. One of those recommendations went this way:

The more we believed an issue was of importance to our community, the more relentlessly we’d stay on top of it ourselves. If we concluded that continuing down a current policy path was a danger, we’d actively campaign to persuade people to change course. This would have meant, for example, loud and persistent warnings about the danger of the blatantly obvious housing/financial bubble that inflated during the past decade.

What the Guardian is doing about climate change strikes me as a perfect–maybe the perfect–example of why campaigning should be an essential part of the craft. It’s long overdue for other news organizations to pay attention, and get active, themselves.

17 thoughts on “Guardian’s climate-change campaign is a vital kind of journalism: takes a stand and fights for what it believes

Leave a Reply to Axon Crust Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *