• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
Celebrating our 1,000th edition. The climate news you need
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  FEATURED
BREAKING: UN Nature Summit, the ‘Paris Conference for Biodiversity’, Moves to Montreal in December June 19, 2022
‘LET’S SUE BIG OIL’: Legal Team Launches Class Action Campaign for B.C. Municipalities June 17, 2022
‘It Could Have Been Any of Us’, Colleague Says, After Brazil Confirms Murders of Bruno Pereira, Dom Phillips June 17, 2022
Infrastructure Gap a ‘Life and Death’ Matter as Northern Canada Warms June 17, 2022
Ban Fossil Fuel Ads Like Tobacco Promos, Doctors Urge Ottawa June 10, 2022
Next
Prev
Home Climate & Society Demographics

Major U.S. Television Media Silent on Race-Based Risks of Extreme Weather

June 7, 2020
Reading time: 3 minutes

Team Rubicon/Twitter

Team Rubicon/Twitter

4
SHARES
 

Major broadcast news outlets in the United States are consistently failing to tell a crucially important story about a wide range of epic disasters, from hurricanes to the pandemic—that people living in poor, non-white communities are at far greater risk of grievous harm.

When Hurricane Florence roared ashore on the southeast coast of North Carolina in September 2018, reports Grist, it pummelled communities already in desperate straits: impoverished, awash in industrial pollution, and still reeling from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Matthew two years earlier.

“People are pretty much left on their own to try to navigate out of danger,” said Naeema Muhammad, organizing director of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network. Residents of the “mostly Black and brown communities” damaged by Florence—including the towns of New Bern, Lumberton, and Faison—had to evacuate themselves through floodwaters heavily contaminated with chemicals, coal ash, and human and animal waste. 

But these stories have been unheard by most North Americans, writes Grist. A recent Media Matters report shows that none of the major U.S. national programs—not ABC’s World News Tonight, CBC Evening News, or NBC Nightly News—considered the story of Florence’s impact on marginalized communities worth telling. (Publicly funded PBS Newshour, meanwhile, did provide small but “substantive” coverage of the disparate impacts of hurricanes on non-white and low-income citizens.)

And those media outlets had plenty of opportunity to give voice to the issue: 669 segments about hurricanes and tropical storms were produced from 2017 to 2019,  but “not one addressed the fact that these extreme weather events did not affect everyone in their paths equally—that the devastation they brought to poor communities and communities of colour was far worse,” writes Grist. That was despite the availability of “ample research highlighting this disparity.”

Failing to tell such stories “creates a huge blind spot in people’s perception, public perception, and policy-makers’ perception,” and “sends a message that there are some people in society that we collectively deem not important, that it is not worth saving their lives,” said Juan Declet-Baretto, a social scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

The Media Matters report also shows that media outlets keep a similar silence on other inequities. “When it comes to the novel coronavirus, the organization found that the same three corporate broadcast news shows failed to report on the connection between air pollution and the high COVID-19 death rate among people of colour, especially Black people,” writes Grist.

Many people have had enough. “We have all of this environmental degradation in our communities, where people feel like they got a right to dump crap that they don’t want onto poor communities, and predominantly people of colour, without a thought, and without being held accountable for the damages that they’ve caused,” said Muhammad. “Communities gotta be made to prove that they’re being harmed when all this stuff happens.” 

As the pandemic rages and hurricane season approaches, the public must press U.S. media to get out into affected communities and tell their stories, writes Grist. “The evidence is already there,” said Muhammad. “If you sit there and hear the story and look around, people are not making this shit up. It’s real. People are living this stuff every single day.”



in Demographics, Environmental Justice, Health & Safety, Media, Messaging, & Public Opinion, Severe Storms & Flooding, United States, Water

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

Erik Whalen/wikimedia commons
Severe Storms & Flooding

Yellowstone Park Reopens, But Flood Recovery Could Take Years, Cost Billions

June 24, 2022
60
TAFE SA TONSLEY/Flickr
International Agencies & Studies

Clean Energy Investment to Exceed $1.4T This Year, Still Falls Short of Climate Goals: IEA

June 24, 2022
80
zephylwer0/pixabay
Supply Chains & Consumption

North American Steel, Aluminium Giants Lumber Toward Green Transition

June 24, 2022
147

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

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

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

Jason Woodhead/Flickr

Trans Mountain Pipeline On Track to Lose $600 Million, Parliamentary Budget Officer Finds

June 24, 2022
288
Ben_Kerckx/Pixabay

Plastics Cited as ‘Fossil Industry’s Plan B’ as Guilbeault Announces Partial Ban

June 24, 2022
171
zephylwer0/pixabay

North American Steel, Aluminium Giants Lumber Toward Green Transition

June 24, 2022
147
Nemaska Lithium/Facebook

Critical Minerals, Hydrogen Lead Ottawa’s Low-Carbon Industry Strategy

June 24, 2022
79
/PxFul

Canadian Farmers Offer Ottawa a Roadmap to Cut Agriculture Emissions

June 24, 2022
83
Bruce Reeve/Flickr

Opinion: Ontario’s New ‘Carbon Tax’ Looks Like the One Doug Ford Fought

June 7, 2022
1.5k

Recent Posts

Erik Whalen/wikimedia commons

Yellowstone Park Reopens, But Flood Recovery Could Take Years, Cost Billions

June 24, 2022
60
TAFE SA TONSLEY/Flickr

Clean Energy Investment to Exceed $1.4T This Year, Still Falls Short of Climate Goals: IEA

June 24, 2022
80
Cjp24/Wikimedia Commons

UK Green Shift Won’t Repeat Job Destruction of Deindustrialization, Report Finds

June 24, 2022
29
Pavlofox/Pixabay

Millions Face Famine as Climate Disasters, Ukraine War Slash Food Supplies

June 24, 2022
38
Chris Lim/Wikimedia Commons

China Has 9 Times the Wind, Solar Potential It Needs for Carbon Neutrality

June 24, 2022
54
willenhallwench / Pixabay

PG&E Risks Greenwashing with Definition of ‘Scope 4’ Emissions

June 24, 2022
44
Next Post
Jay Phagan/Flickr

Trump Order to Speed Pipelines, Gut Environmental Protections is ‘Sitting Duck’ for Legal Challenges

The Energy Mix

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Navigate Site

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Follow Us

No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}