Earth911 Podcast: Project Censored's Andy Lee Roth on Under-Reported Environmental Stories

In today’s media environment, disinformation and distraction are pervasive. The most troubling issue may not be misinformation but the critical information that is systematically ignored or underreported. Andy Lee Roth, Editor-at-Large of Project Censored, returns to Sustainability In Your Ear to discuss the top censored stories of 2023–2024, with a special focus on environmental reporting. Project Censored has tracked and amplified suppressed stories since 1976, drawing attention to the topics that corporate media tends to ignore. Roth highlights how the U.S. is witnessing explicit censorship of climate-related information alongside the erosion of regulatory frameworks and cutting federal support for scientific research. Media campaigns are designed to resist change and maintain the status quo, even at the expense of future generations.

In 2024, most of Project Censored’s top stories involve environmental issues, signaling a critical moment in our media landscape. From the health risks associated with gas stoves to the underreported impacts of climate debt, from greenwashed net-zero pledges to global and domestic challenges in water security, vital environmental and climate issues often go unreported. The stories are not lacking in evidence, they are under-reported due to the incentives of media ownership and the influence of advertisers. Roth argues that people can practice media literacy to unpack the incomplete narratives that dominate the media to better understand the world around them. Ultimately, he believes that change lies in the hands of an informed and engaged public. Citizens are the ultimate arbiters of policy, values, and future direction—and it’s through independent journalism that society learns and debates a more sustainable and just future. You can learn more about Project Liberty and the Under-Reported Stories of the Year at projectcensored.org.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you
are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability
in your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating
the transition to a sustainable carbon neutral society, and I'm
your host Mitt Tracliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Disinformation and distraction are everywhere. That's our subject today, and

(00:29):
they're not just problems of social media, partisan politics, or
algorithmic rabbit holes. From climate debt traps to the hidden
dangers of gas stoves, from the greenwashing of net zero
pledges to the global risks that children face due to
water insecurity. Entire swaths of critical information go unreported or
underreported every year, not because the facts are unavailable, but

(00:52):
because the incentives of media ownership and advertising discourage deep
structural coverage of the challenges that are our industrial economy represents.
So it's a pleasure to welcome back to the show.
Andy Lee Roth, editor at large of Projects Censored since
nineteen seventy six, the organization has tracked and amplified vital

(01:13):
stories that the corporate press has failed to cover. He's
also the co editor of Project Censored's annual book series
and has written extensively on the intersections of media, democracy,
and power. Andy returns to the show to talk about
the collaborative process that he has participated in, involving students
and faculty for more than two dozen colleges and universities

(01:34):
that work to surface some of the most censored stories
in the world each year, and today we'll be talking
with Andy about the top censored stories of twenty twenty
three and twenty twenty four, with a special focus on
environmental and climate reporting. We'll explore what's happening to society
when essential truths get buried, and about who benefits from
the silence, and how independent journalism is pushing back against

(01:57):
systematic neglect. You can learn more about Andy and Project
Censored at Project censored dot org, Project Censored All one Word,
no Dash, no Space, Project censored dot org. We'll get
to the conversation right after this quick commercial break. Welcome

(02:18):
back to the show. Andy. How are you doing well?

Speaker 2 (02:23):
It's a tough one to answer these days, Mitch, but
overall I'm doing okay and uh looking for the silver
linings and the opportunities as we face every day kind
of new new wrinkles in the ongoing cascade of you know,
stories about the dismantling of important you know, environmental regulations

(02:47):
and the gutting of important environmental science research. So it's
these are challenging times, but myself and my Project Censored
colleagues are fully committed to the idea of, you know,
it's important to talk about the news that didn't make
the news.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
Well, and I think that's incredibly important. And so let's
cover a few of those stories. But before we start,
I want to ask a question about what you just
referred to the momentous here that we are in the
midst of, how do you think that an independent media
is doing in the face of what is pretty obviously
rising authoritarianism.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah, yes to the latter, pretty obviously with all the
implications of it. So where you know, you and I
are talking the day after masked ICE officials came to
arrest a graduate student for writing an op ed piece,
and and you know, we're talking in the context of

(03:45):
what folks at Reporters Without Borders have been describing, as
you know, every day opening President Trump is opening new
fronts on his war on the press. So we're going
to make it.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
Sorry, are we going to make it?

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yeah, I think we are because I mean what I
will say, and I knock would as I say it is.
I believe we're in a kind of a golden era
for independent media and independent journalism, especially online. And so
there are organizations responding to kind of what's been happening

(04:27):
since the November election, organizations of independent journalists. So I'm thinking,
for instance, of the Movement Media Alliance, which is being
spearheaded by folks at truth Out among others, to bring
together so that to bring together independent news outlets, independent journalism,

(04:47):
independent newsrooms to work together in coordination with one another
to respond to some of these extraordinary challenges that we're facing.
So you the idea, of course, is that we always
have had independent news outlets covering stories and doing the
work that independent journalists and journalism does. But now the

(05:11):
idea is, hey, in the face of these challenges, we
have to organize. We have to be organized ourselves, and
so we're having internal discussions that projects censored about how,
you know, how we can be best prepared. Hopefully we
aren't facing ice agents and masks coming after us for

(05:31):
things we've written about the Trump administration over the years.
But I think you know, it sounds like a cliche
in certain context, but the idea of solidarity, the idea
of linking arms and working together, is a crucial response
to the current challenges.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
Let's look back before we start talking about some of
the stories about Derbert. How did Project Censored get started?
I mean, it seems so incredibly relevant now, But tell
us the story about how we got here and how
you pick these stories.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, just a quick version of the story, our story,
because it's it's a nearly fifty year long story now.
But it begins at Sonoma State University in northern California,
part of the California State University System, where Carl Jensen,
who was a former advertising and journalism guy, was teaching
a class around the time of the Watergate investigations and

(06:26):
the re election of Richard Nixon, and a student asks
Carl how it could be that on election night when
Nixon won reelection, not a single one of the major
news networks covering the election mentioned Watergate. And the question
intrigued Carl, and he began thinking about, more broadly, the

(06:47):
kinds of stories that weren't getting reported and that launched
What now is the students who helped identify and vet
and summer rise the stories in this year's yearbook, State
of the Free Press twenty twenty five are the forty
ninth cohort of undergraduate students now at campuses, college and

(07:12):
university campuses across the country, not just at Cinoma State,
who have been digging these these stories from independent sources
and comparing them for their corresponding or lack of corporate
news coverage, and then summarizing them in sort of bite
sized chunks that people who are busy and perceive themselves as, oh,

(07:35):
I don't have time to really be a news junkie. Well,
a short summary is something you can digest in a
few minutes, and if you're intrigued, the sources are there
for people to go dig deeper. So it's you know,
we're going on a fifty year Our fiftieth anniversary is
coming up next year in twenty twenty six, and all

(07:57):
along the goal has been to champion independent journalism and to,
as we say, to kind of bring wider public attention
to news stories that are deserving of that attention but
haven't gotten the spotlight from the establishment press.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
Well, spitting that should be the fiftieth anniversary of Project
Censored on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the
nation's founding, which of course, was, amongst other things, predicated
on a free press.

Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah, Carl was a former advertising guy, and so the
idea that he was launching Projects Censored in nineteen seventy six,
the Vice centennial year, he knew what he was doing.
And you can see all kinds of things that were
Carl's sensibility as an advertising and a media guy and
not just a professor, influenced sort of how the project.

(08:50):
You know, he picked the name Project Censored because he
knew it would be a puzzler for people, right, it
would attract it would raise questions, what do you mean
Project censored? What's been insert? Right? That's a lightning rod issue,
and so a lot of people will say to us, like,
you know, almost fifty years later, censorship, what do you
mean by censorship? Right? And so we'll talk about for instance,

(09:11):
that you know, we need a modern twenty first century
definition of censorship that goes beyond what might have been historically.
The concerns around First Amendment, Uh, you know, protections of
press freedom, which are very much a concern today, but
also the idea that you know, censorship, we need to

(09:33):
be concerned not just about censorship from governmental sources, but
censorship by corporate entities and interests as well.

Speaker 1 (09:43):
So we're going to concentrate on some of the stories
that are environmentally focused, and unfortunately a lot of them are.
But let's start with the first. That's the backtracking by
companies about their net zero commitments. And this was reported
by Taylor Connolly in the E in E The Environmental
magazine in February twenty twenty four. That's what you're pointing
to as an example of this kind of coverage. What

(10:04):
do you think the mainstream press risks by failing to
really interrogate the legitimacy of these corporate net zero claims.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
Well, one way to answer that question is to say, like,
let's open up and reconsider whether we want to even
talk about the mainstream press. Is the mainstream press? Why
aren't we getting corporate news coverage of corporations backing down
on their net zero promises? So this is a story
about how corporations are kind of strutting in front of

(10:36):
the spotlight when there are opportunities to boast and brag
about their commitments to the environment and their commitments to
addressing the climate crisis. But then in reality, when the
hard work is there to be done or the profits
are you know, perhaps compromised by those pronounced commitments, is

(10:59):
a story. So e the environmental magazine Conley, who you mentioned,
reports less than four percent of the thousand companies that
net zero Tracker has tracked are doing the bare minimum
to be considered in line with the goals from the
twenty fifteen Paris Agreements. The rest of the companies weren't
even meeting the so called starting line criteria that we're

(11:23):
laid out. Then, so this is a this is an
abysmal failure overall. But again I want to go back
and say, let's not talk about the mainstream media. Let's
talk in this case about this being the corporate news media.
And as corporate news media, the news coverage they produce

(11:44):
reflects a corporate worldview and often promotes corporate interests. And
so a story about corporate failure is just the kind
of story that you know, you might expect, Oh, this
is going to get soft pedaled or downplay or not
covered at all. And indeed that's what we found when
we investigated this story that you can find. You know,

(12:09):
you will find extensive coverage about you know, net zero campaigns,
but the net zero tracker study about companies walking back
their climate commitments was was covered hardly at all in
the in the establishment press. And I think again that

(12:30):
reflects that reflects this kind of the way that what
we think of as sort of mainstream news typically reflects
a corporate worldview.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
One of the challenges of reading a lot of independent writing, however,
is being able to fact check those sources as well.
And we know that there's a lot of coordinated effort
to spread misinformation. How what kind of media literacy skills
do people need to develop in this era in order
to distinguish between you know, a real commitment to make

(13:03):
a reduction and greenwashing, for instance.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
I mean, I think one thing that people can do
that is sort of critical media literacy one oh one
is look at the sources of the story that you're
engaged with, Right, So, if it's a if it's a
broadcast story, look at who who is speaking in the
sound bites. If it's a print story, look at who
the quoted sources are and whose interests do they represent? Right,

(13:28):
And so if you see a story based on you know,
if you see a story about net zero commitments by
corporate entities and every quoted source is a corporate spokesperson,
your critical media literacy antenna might start buzzing, and you
might start thinking, Hey, I wonder if this is really
a multi perspectable story or not. Is there a critical
edge in this story? How?

Speaker 1 (13:52):
One of the things you need to be aware of, too,
is that a lot of particularly on the conservative side,
organizations have set up false fronts think tank with apparently
benign sounding titles, which have a very authoritarian bent. How
do you identify those amongst all those spokespeople that might

(14:13):
be quoted in the story.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah, so, I mean I think that's good. Right now,
we're now imagining the kind of the steps we might
take if we were reading a story and we wanted
to kind of assess for ourselves, like how narrow or
broad is the range of perspective reflected in this story?
And so looking back at okay, look who is the source?

(14:36):
I think in general, it's good to be skeptical of,
and it's good to be skeptical of anyone identified with
an organization like characterized as being a think tank, right, because,
as you point out, Mitch, like a lot of those
organizations are like fronts for political agendas and ideology. And
but that again, like I mentioned, we're in this kind

(14:59):
of golden age of media our ability to to do
you know what in media literacy circles gets called lateral reading, right,
Instead of reading further in this story, we open a
new TB or window on our browser and we check out, well,
who is this person? What is this heritage foundation that

(15:19):
I'm hearing presented as you know, a kind of a
scholarly institution committed to objective analysis of facts? Is that
does that check out? And again that takes more time
to do those things, But eventually, I think if you
do that systematically, you start to begin to kind of understand, well,

(15:42):
what are some of the creatures moving around in this
media ecosystem, and who do these creatures ally themselves with
and how do they function in that system? And you
begin to get a kind of a lay of the
land that makes it so that you're not kind of
researching everything scratch every time. You start seeing as I

(16:03):
love talking about it, Projects censored, you start seeing patterns
in the coverage and there are I'm a sociologist by training,
so all my instinct and professional training is to look
for these underlying patterns. And you know, I love talking
about how it projects censored every story that we cover
each year, like this net zero story from the twenty

(16:26):
twenty five yearbook is important in its own right, but
that over a span of nearly fifty years now, with
twenty five stories a year, we have a fairly large
data set of the kinds of stories that corporate news
media are either ignoring or covering in a partial way
in both senses of that term. And you can start

(16:47):
to see these patterns of the kinds of stories that
either get covered in that either get coverage or don't
get coverage, or they get this kind of partial, incomplete,
potentially biased coverage, and these patterns become over time, like
I think, fairly clear. And again, what we've done organizationally

(17:08):
project since Ittor has been around since you know, before
I cared about the news or politics when you know,
baseball was what mattered to me. But what the project
can do kind of institutionally and organizationally, people can also
do on their own individually, which is that as you
begin tracking stories thinking critically about them, you can see
these patterns. You you've come to see these patterns.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
Yeah, at Earth nine one one, we do try to
include links out so that you can learn more, particularly
to research if we make a claim about some kind
of impact that you can have by making a change
in your lifestyle. But this also raises a challenge for
any corporate journalist is you know, you want to keep
them on your site. You don't want to send them
off to find that that ancillary source that's going to
allow them to validate it. And so to a degree,

(17:53):
with the way that the writing and production of news
in the corporate media functions, you're being enclosed in a
silo of that publication's content.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yes, that definitely happens. I mean that's not I think
a problem on the project since the website. If you
come and look at say the net zero story and
our coverage of it, the most of the links are
outside to the sources that originally broke the you know,
originally broke and reported the story. But you're right there,

(18:26):
there are you know, fundamental economic incentives in a lot
of you know, on a lot of online content to
keep people, to keep people in house, right, And we're
seeing this more and more I would add, you know,
this isn't specific to any subject area or or kind

(18:48):
of social issue, but the way search works and the
way algorithms that drive search engines works is is very
is organized in very similar ways. Right. So that's a
distortion of the kind of free flow of information to
promote kind of financial interests of the host of the

(19:10):
search engine, and that occurs in ways that are often
invisible to the people using the search engine or whatever
the technology is.

Speaker 1 (19:20):
There's a whole lot we can dig into there, But
I want to move on to the next story. Well,
I'm sure we're going to get back to it. So
the second story that you covered, Common Dreams. Reporter Olivia
was on describe the slow progress by the United Nations
on ending deforestation by twenty thirty, which is a UN goal.
As we pull back into our protectionist bubbles all around

(19:42):
the world, how are we going to encourage the kind
of global journalistic effort that might improve transparency and accountability
on something like deforestation or reforestation goals.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah, I mean, I think a couple kinds of answers
to that question. One is I think an old fashioned answer,
follow them right, journalism that follows the money. In this case,
I'll rattle off some figures here. I won't hopefully won't
rattle them too quickly, But part of the forest declaration
assessment that we're talking about in this story is down

(20:17):
to numbers in finance. One of the findings was that
it to kind of the funding necessary to protect and
restore the world's forests would amount to about four hundred
and sixty billion dollars per year in green financing. But
every year between twenty thirteen and twenty eighteen, national governments

(20:39):
had spent up to between three hundred and seventy eight
and six hundred and thirty five billion in so called
gray financing, gray meaning that there it had clear harmful
impacts on forests. And the amount that's being spent per
year to protect, conserve and restore forests was a mere
two point two billion dollars. So this mass of disproportion,

(21:02):
or this massive gap between the necessary budget and the
actual budget, and then, as the kicker on it, massive
spending of this so called gray funding that's actually detrimental
to the restoration and protection of the remaining for us.
So I think you know, one thing that journalism has
always been good at doing is you know a certain

(21:24):
kind of journalism. Maybe it's a sort of muckraking. Journalism
is to follow the money and the interests and the interconnections.
And I think, you know, a doubling down on old
fashioned commitments to seeking the truth and reporting it, as
the Society of Professional Journalists talks about, is still fundamentally
a good compass to follow. The other thing I would say,
in terms of how you know, how we can have

(21:47):
better reporting on these issues is comes down to a
point made by Gay Tuckman, pioneering sociologist of news. In
the late nineteen seventies, Gay Tuckman wrote a book about
a book called Making News about the social construction of
news stories as sociologists are inclined, and one of the

(22:09):
key distinctions that she made was the difference between events
and issues. And I think stories like this you can
see why they get shunted aside and why they don't
get well covered. Journalism, Tuckman said, was really good at
covering events. Right. If there's a dramatic occasion, journalists know
how to cover that. So you know, this morning, one

(22:31):
of the headlines is that a kind of a tourist
submarine off the coast of Egypt in the Red Sea sank.
That's an easy dramatic event for a reporter to cover.
But something that happens every day that's a slow building
or a slow disintegrating process is much like it poses

(22:52):
challenges for reporters, it poses challenges for readers of that reporting.
And so if we're talking about something kind of abstract
like ending deforestation by the year twenty thirty, it's an
issue that matters in deep fundamental ways, as everyone who
listens to Earth nine one to one already understands, I think,

(23:15):
but it's not an issue that has immediate hooks to say.
This story matters right now, and it should matter every
day moving forward.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
You mentioned muckraking earlier, and muckraking journalism involved in the
time of William McKinley, the president's current hero. It is
fitting that it seems to be coming back in response
to the repeat of the McKinley administration now.

Speaker 2 (23:37):
And it's especially it's especially just to add on to that,
like you know, the it was a response to Gilded
Age robber barons and whatnot, and we have our new
kind of techno plutocrats now, some of whom today own
newspapers much the way the robber barons of this earlier

(23:58):
era did. So the parallels there are really striking, and
we could talk all morning about that.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
Well. But then the other way that we get the
coverage that we're talking about is there is one part
of the world that has a deforestation regulation. The EU
does not allow materials that are contribute to deforestation and
products sold in the continent. That's a very everyday kind
of thing, but it's also the kind of thing that

(24:24):
the conservative press will say, look at all that regulation,
they're not letting you choose. And what can our readers,
for instance, due to support global reporting to give them
an accurate view of this kind of an issue, deforestation,
which is pretty amorphous from seeing the trees for the
forest perspective.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah, I mean, I think one thing is just when
you find news outlets that are making these connections, that
are doing a better job than the establishment press of
covering the issues and not just the events, like support, right,
you know, and that can that can be financial, of course, right,

(25:05):
support them, send them a donation, but it can also
be as simple as like subscribe directly to their newsletter. Yeah.
I think one of the things, right, now, and I
don't want to change our topic here, but you know,
the algorithms that I mentioned a moment ago are affecting
our news feeds on social platforms like Facebook and Instagram

(25:27):
and others, and even on you know, although it seems
like an unregulated hell, also on Twitter x. And so
subscribing directly to a newsletter is one way of bypassing
some of that algorithmic filtering that definitely impacts the kinds
of stories that you're likely to see. If you're only

(25:47):
relying on a social media feed to recommend stories.

Speaker 1 (25:51):
To you, it will get even more complicated as AI
becomes the primary interface through which we interact with information.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Yeah that's exactly right.

Speaker 1 (26:03):
Wow, well I'm that happy. Not Let's turn to the
third topic. Al Jazeera, Vatican News, and several other publications
have covered the declining access to clean water available to children.
About one third of the children on the planet don't
have access to clean water. Can you tell us about
a few examples of effective storytelling and reporting that have
successfully brought child focused climate issues into public discourse. I

(26:25):
mean there are there good examples, not just examples of
cover ups.

Speaker 2 (26:30):
Yeah, well, I mean I would say you know, part
of that is going to be you know, the reporting
that we've covered in this year's book is exemplifies. I think,
you know, all the stories, all the reporting that we
cover in the Top twenty five exemplifies, I think the
very best of kind of independent investigative journalism. And those

(26:53):
outlets may not be flawless on every topic and every issue,
but they are ones that deserve attention and support. You know,
this story is based on a UNISEF report, the Climate
Change Child that the basic point of the report is
that children are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis,

(27:16):
right and there is therefore the UNISEF report sums up
a child's right, a children's rights crisis as a result
of this, and so that's you know, it's interesting to
think about how do you how do you cover something
like that. A lot of successful social movements are based

(27:37):
on the idea of our kids need a place to play,
our kids need safe drinking water, et cetera, et cetera.
And yet this is a story that you know, it's
in our Top twenty five list this year because no
major establishment news outlets in the US have covered this

(27:58):
story adequately. They've covered bits and pieces of it, but
they haven't. You know, we say, as of May twenty
twenty four, when this book went to press, no corporate
media outlets in the US bothered to break this astonishing news,
the UNISEF report about the climate change child. So I mean,

(28:20):
I think one thing is I would say better coverage.
To go back to your question, focusing on solutions. Focusing
on solutions, there's solutions journalism is I think, an incredibly
important and increasingly prevalent kind of version of journalism. The

(28:42):
idea that responses to problems are newsworthy, which is in
effect the slogan of the Solutions Journalism Network, which I
would recommend to anyone interested in environmental issues, or more broadly,
their story tracker, which is an online feature allows you
to look at to look by outlet, to look by region,

(29:07):
to look by story theme and topic, and so for instance,
you can they there's a on the Solutions Journalism's Network
story tracker, one of the issue areas that you can
check and get see stories from all different kinds of sources,
including some that project censored would you know, probably label

(29:27):
as corporate news, but you will get stories for instance
about clean water hygiene and sanitation and If you follow
that link, you'll come across things like Yes Magazine talking
about you know, examples if you look at the story
tracker Yes Magazine reporting last year on water apartheid in Gaza.

(29:51):
You can also come across an older report about how
from the Christian Science Monitor about how atmospheric water generation
is developing technology that can be used to provide clean,
sanitary water in places that are otherwise experiencing drought. So

(30:16):
there are solutions out there, and so this pertains to
this story specifically, but I think it also holds more generally.
There are solutions out there. But when I was talking
earlier about some of the systemic gaps that we see
looking back historically at corporate news media, solutions stories are
often underreported by corporate news outlets, and so they're one

(30:37):
of the gaps, I would say, And I think, you know,
this is to shift from reporting something that's a simple
matter of fact to interpreting the reasons for that. If
you think about the corporate news media, is it a
useful message for corporate interests? Does it reflect a corporate

(30:57):
worldview to regularly each your stories where people in communities
are coming together to solve problems on their own and
you know, the sociologist in me says, oh, there might
be a conflict of interest there for the corporate news outlet.
That if people suddenly start becoming aware that all over

(31:20):
the world, communities of people are banding together and doing
this on whatever the issue is that faces them, that
can be a catalyst for more of that action, and
people may begin to then realize that their lives and
their life chances are more in their hands than they

(31:41):
might think if they only read the corporate news and
see yet another story about how something has gone wrong
and the only people capable of fixing it are from
outside of the community.

Speaker 1 (31:53):
Well, and I think that's the key, and where we
have the opportunity for real change is the recognition of
our eyes opportunity to self organize these solutions and move
some of these problems solving efforts back to the community
rather than exporting them to corporations or to global or
national government. And I see that a lot in the

(32:15):
work that I do as a consultant. There are solutions everywhere.
The connection of resources to those solutions is the hard part.
We need to take a quick commercial break, but we
need to continue this important conversation we'll be right back now,

(32:36):
let's get back to the show. We're talking with Andy
Lee Roth, editor at large Projects Censored, about the twenty
five most censored stories of twenty twenty four, with a
special focus on environmental reporting. So, Andy, the fourth story
that we want to talk about, and this was your
number four story of the year, was how natural gas
stoves impact the both human health and the environment, and

(32:59):
they became campaign issue in twenty twenty four. The well,
it was NPR and the Climate Investigation Center broke the
story in November twenty twenty three. What did they find?

Speaker 2 (33:10):
Yeah, the idea. This is kind of a classic project
since her story, I would say, Mitch, it's about a
decades long disinformation campaign to convince Americans that having natural
gas in your home is not only safe, but like
you know, it'll make you like Julia Child's or whatever

(33:32):
the celebrity chef of the day is. So it's a
disinformation campaign. We know, and I should add here Rebecca
Lieber a Vox also had important reporting on this. We
know that the gas industry, so the natural gas industry
has been using basically tactics drawn from and adapted from

(33:55):
the tobacco industry. To promote, in this case, not cigarettes
and smoking, but to promote the use of natural gas
and homes. And the strategic kind of entry point for
that was the natural gas stove, which going back to
the seventies, we know now thanks to this investigative reporting,

(34:15):
that when you saw Julia Childs, the famous chef, cooking
on her stove, it was a natural gas stove, and
she might even say something about how the natural gas
allowed her to control the burners, you know, to get
a better execution of the recipe that she was working on.
An she was an early influence, right. You know, we

(34:38):
talk about with Projects Centered, we talk about how we
were doing critical media literacy before there was a term
for it, and Julia and Julia Childs was an influencer,
a cooking influencer before we had that term too. So
you know, this story did get some coverage as we
look at it, but as you noted in the setup

(34:58):
for for for our talking about this story now, the
corporate media that covered this story didn't cover the decades
long propaganda campaign to promote gas appliances in households. They
focused on this as kind of another chapter in the
ongoing cultural war. Right, and you know the liberals would

(35:19):
be coming, you know, not for your gun, but for
your for your your gas stove. So there is coverage
in this case, but it's coverage that is truly in
the sense I was talking about partial, it's incomplete and
probably biased. Why gas stoves. Part of the marketing strategy
was the gas stove was a prominent appliance in the household,

(35:40):
right in the kitchen, a center of gathering. But also
the idea.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
Was it's a question to inderd checked the phrase cooking
with gas is an advertising slogan from nineteen fifty nine.
In nineteen sixty, I still use it when I'm expressing doing.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
Well yeah, yeah, right, we're cooking with gas here.

Speaker 1 (35:58):
Yeah, right, and we have to cook with renewable energy.
You're talking about the way that we also inject memes
into society in a new and different way, let's say,
an amplified way. What can we do as readers and
potentially in support a various media to turn this lens

(36:20):
around and not see it through the lens of the industry,
but see it through the lens of the impact of
the industry.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yeah, I love that question. It leads directly to something
that my colleague Shale Voidel and I have been working
on for the last year or so. In media studies,
we often talk about framing, the framing of a story, right,
and if you think about like a picture frame and
how it shapes what you see, and a picture frame
focuses our attention on some things andcludes or or leaves

(36:53):
outside of the picture as it were, other issues. And
so Shaley Voidal and I have been working on what
we call frame checking as an addition to the kind
of basic media literacy skill of fact checking and the
ideas with frame checking, we're interested in stories that are
factually accurate but nonetheless misleading because the frame, the framing

(37:17):
of the story dates how we interpret and make sense
of those facts. And so one of the things that
Shaley has been working on a lot, partly as a way,
partly as a strategic effort to convince young people that
this is interesting and worth their time and energy is
looking at the framing of social media influencers posts and

(37:40):
so this is everything from recommendations about makeup on platforms
like TikTok and Instagram to efforts to recruit people to
the military, which isn't you know, it's not the it's
not the drill sergeant comes to your gym and challenges
people to push up contests anymore. The recruiting efforts on
social media now are being done by very attractive young

(38:04):
people who have kind of day in the life of
the military videos that they post where it looks like
sort of like going to summer camp and other videos
short videos. These are like TikTok style videos where the
idea is I just went on a five hundred dollars
shopping spree because that I could undertake because of my

(38:26):
signing bonus.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
All its shrills with none of the substances exactly.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
Or you know, I traveled the world and paid for
my education. And so it's not that that's actually incorrect claim,
but the framing of it leaves out important things about
what it means to serve day to day in the military.
And I'll leave that at that for the time being.
The point being that some of the tools that we
tend to think of. We originally developed the frame checking Guide,

(38:54):
which is online at the Project Censored website for anyone
who's a teacher and wants to use it with their
students available. We originally developed that to analyze news stories
but we started getting interested in how framing, of course,
isn't limited to journalism framing. We're constantly framing things all
the time, and social media influencers are definitely using framing

(39:17):
to either boost their accounts or drive their followers to
certain products, or in the case of the military recruiting,
to make someone think about, well maybe I should sign
up And so yeah, you know, I think if we're
talking about natural gas story, stoves were the center play, centerpiece.

(39:41):
You could have celebrity chefs and influencers all using gas stoves,
which isn't a very expensive thing, but it's incredibly influential.
And then in terms of the business interests of the industry,
once you have a gas stove, you're more likely to
put in a gas powered furnace, a gas powered water heater,

(40:02):
a gas powered clothes dryer, and the knock on effects
of that in terms of industry profits has been huge.
And that's part of this reporting on this story too.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
And climate impacts as well. Your number three story also
focused on water, the intrusion of salt water into drinking
water supplies along the coast because of rising sea levels.
The Guardian and The Conversation covered the story, But tell
us why is salt water intrusion, despite this potentially devastating
impact on millions of people, millions of Americans, not a

(40:34):
more visible part of the climate infrastructure coverage that we
should be talking about right now.

Speaker 2 (40:40):
I think this is another one where we can talk
about like events versus issues, or what happened today versus
what happens every day one of our So our story
process is going back to an earlier moment in our
conversation today. Our story process involves a kind of year
long vetting of stories that culminates in judges who are

(41:03):
media experts, voting to help giving their input and then
ultimately voting to help us rank the stories. And one
of our judges is a retired professor named Robert Hackett
who talks in a book called The Missing News, which
was kind of like Project Censored focused on Canada. Hackett

(41:26):
is Canadian. He talks about how corporate media are very
good at covering what happened today, but not good at
covering what happens every day. Right, So this is down
to value, down to definitions of news value and news
judgment based on those definitions. And so this story, you know,

(41:46):
we did have coverage of saltwater intrusion in the fall
of twenty twenty three. So to back up, saltwater intrusion
is a problem because as the reporting that we feature
in the yearbook about can week havoc on farmlands, ecosystems,
and livelihoods. In the fall of twenty twenty three, saltwater

(42:08):
intrusion was briefly a major issue for corporate news outlets.
Saltwater intrusion from the Gulf of Mexico, and I'll use
that term advisedly. The Gulf of Mexico was coming up
the Mississippi River and infiltrating freshwater systems in the Delta region,
contaminating drinking water, messing up with agricultural water supplies, and

(42:31):
also damaging inland ecosystems. So there was news coverage of that,
but as soon as the salt water line backed down
to its normal level, the coverage disappeared, except for local
news outlets saying it was a blip, We're back to normal,
no need to worry.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
Well, that's the point about news judgment too. Thinking about
it as the thing that happens every day. Another community's
water was impacted by salination doesn't play well compared to
tourist submarine off the coast of Egypt sinks mind died,
and so we don't get the opportunity to see these

(43:11):
stories because they are incremental rather than momentous exactly.

Speaker 2 (43:17):
And also in this case, like very specific to this story,
the salt line, as it's known, which is the zone
where fresh inland water meets salty seawater. The salt line
naturally moves back and forth to some degree, and single
events like floods and storms can push it further out right.

(43:38):
But the point here, and this is the climate kickers
on this story and why it's in our top twenty
five list, is that with climate change rising, seas are
gradually pulling the salt line in, and this is affecting
coastal communities all over the United States and around the world.
And as that salt line comes in, it's not just

(43:59):
a f in coastal communities. It's all the kind of
what happens upstream, as it were. And so this is
a major story, and it's pretty shocking to see that.
Other than that brief period in fall of twenty twenty
three when it was a kind of an event worthy crisis,

(44:23):
the reports that the studies that this story is based
on have been basically ignored, right, the idea that, Okay,
we're going to have more of these more often, which
sounds familiar if we talk about like extreme weather events
associated with climate. Here's another variation on that theme, saltwater

(44:43):
intrusion with all its implications for drinking water, agriculture, inland ecosystems.

Speaker 1 (44:50):
Yeah, we ignored extreme weather as it grew from one
tenth of what it is today because it was just
another event rather than a process that you could clearly
articulate as in a short story. Because another of the
curses of our time is that that are a lot

(45:11):
of editors. You think, you know, nobody's going to read
more than eight hundred words, and these are stories that
take real time. And that brings me to the last story.
The World Resources Institute and others have reported about the
vicious cycle of debt that is preventing many countries in
the Global South from responding to climate change. And of course,
given are the United States retreat from foreign aid, how

(45:36):
can journalists start to tell this story in a way
that has an impact on Americans so that we potentially
return to partnering with the world to dealing with the
problems that our industrial economy has created.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
And that's a heavy task for journalism to carry all
by its lonesome.

Speaker 1 (45:52):
Well, somebody's got to do it if the other estates give.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Up, I know, right, I mean, yeah, no. You know
another of our judges, Nicks Johnson, who's a former FCC
commissioner in addition to being a retired communications professor. Nick
always talks about your second priority, and he wrote a
book with that title, actually, and what he means by
that is that whatever your key issue of concern is

(46:17):
your first priority, So the climate crisis, systemic police violence,
you name it. Whatever your first priority is, your second
priority better be media reform and basically press freedom because
without this, without that, you're unlikely to make any progress
on your first priority. Right, And so this is a

(46:39):
kind of a I think a Nick Johnson your second
priority story. You know, this story is is again this
is truly like, this is not something like we can
point to everyday impacts of this vicious circle of climate death.
The thing that stands out for me is the idea.
So the World Resources Institute is the source of the

(46:59):
study that the journalism that we celebrate was based on
and one of their findings was that, so if we
talk about the world's most climate vulnerable nations and we
say there are fifty most vulnerable nations, twenty three of
those fifty most climate vulnerable nations are either in debt

(47:20):
distress or they're this close to being in debt distress.
And debt distress is the term used, meaning they're unable
to repay the principle and the interest owed to the creditors.
And this is an issue in developing so called developing countries,
because it's incredibly expensive to be climate resilient, right, it

(47:43):
requires immense national budgets, and one of the first things
to get cut in an impoverished country are a kind
of climate resilience programs. So, and then the vicious cycle
that we're talking about. And so this is something I
don't understand in answer to your question, don't understand why
this story can't get more traction than it has. And

(48:05):
partly Project Centered is trying to make more people aware
of it is because these nations have extreme debt that
they can't even keep up with the interest on the debt.
They begin cutting basic social programs that in turn leads
to public distrust in government, there's further impoverishment, the country's

(48:28):
credit ratings go down and then and.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
That reduces economic resilience. I mean, the whole thing just unravels,
and we're doing it even to ourselves at this point.

Speaker 2 (48:42):
I think that's true. Yes, it's so. I mean, I
think one of the things to one of the recommendations
of the study was that we need to be doing
more to help these debt distressed countries maintain their climate
programs and basic social services. And it's perhaps in a

(49:05):
kind of global interest to do so, because it's not
good overall when countries dissolve into chaos. Right, It's obviously
not good for the citizens of those countries and the
way it impacts their lives, but it's also bad on
a global scale as well. And you could argue, you

(49:26):
could argue that, okay, well there's a version of capitalism
that thrives on and profits from that disorder. But I
think you know, this is this is one of these
stories that exemplifies kind of what is maybe the theme
of our conversation this morning. Right, Because there's not any single,
one dramatic instance, reporters then have to figure out, well,

(49:48):
how do you dramatize a story that's about grinding inequality, right,
and and how do you make that story palatable to
an audience who's national government is implicated in these very
in the in the very policies that are the source
of these of this suffering.

Speaker 1 (50:09):
Andy, you've been very generous with your time. I want
to ask one last question, which is what do you
see as the emerging climate stories that we should be following.
What publications would you recommend that folks track And.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
Yeah, this is so great. Well, I mean, on the downside,
we're seeing literally just this morning, the scientists who first
identified what we know colloquially as acid rain, warning that
under the current kind of purge of science funding for

(50:43):
research and attacks on federal science organizations, that we're probably
going to see a return of so called acid rain
in a way that we thought we didn't have to
face again. So this I feel like this is like
the climate version of what we're hearing about things like
measles and polio. On a more positive note, journalism has

(51:06):
a role to play here. You know, the Trump administration
purged a tool that had been created by FEMA to
help people assess the costs of climate change not just
in the abstract, but as affecting their regions, in their communities.
That tool was purged, but the Guardian reported yesterday, I

(51:27):
think working with data scientists, they've recreated that tool and
they and they've you know what the federal government under
the current administration won't make publicly available. They have.

Speaker 1 (51:41):
This is a really interesting point because this is an
area I've been thinking a lot about. As people see
these federal databases abandoned. You can restore it to what
it was, but you can't update it without further funding,
which is what the government was providing. Are there opportunities
for us to do so as the public or to
work with philanthropic leaders to recreate and then continue to

(52:05):
update these databases.

Speaker 2 (52:08):
I mean, I suppose that's out of my area of
expertise or I black my crystal ball.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
Are there organizations that would be interested in it? Do
you think?

Speaker 2 (52:16):
Oh? I think so? And I mean think the demand
is huge, right, I Mean the hard thing is, like,
so the recreation of this FEMA tool, like most people
didn't even know about this, and the scientists who created
it it kind of soft pedaled it in anticipation of
the fact that it was probably going to be targeted
if not taken down. And so that's part of the problem,

(52:38):
right is I think again public awareness, and I think
one of the big challenges, you know, I don't I
haven't thought this through myself. I tend my training is
as a sociologist, I think, and I think there's a
real importance to the Marxist concept of false consciousness, the

(52:59):
idea that we've been led to believe that our interests
are different than they are. And you know, it's a
point of internal wrestling for me. You can't just tell
someone false consciousness, dude, Like no one wants to hear that.
That's not going to be how you win any arguments.
But I think one of our challenges is to figure

(53:21):
out how do we convince people that positions they've held passionately,
that they are willing to double down on again and
again may be contrary to their self interest. That's that's
the challenge I'm thinking about all the time now because
I think, like you know, I'm a big believer in

(53:42):
the critical media literacy programs that project since theor Champions,
and I think they have the potential to change people's minds,
and we see that happening in classrooms with young people
who start out never having heard of Julian Assange, and
after they dig on a story about the persecution of
as Soannge and whether as as It should be considered
a journalist or not, or whether he's simply a publisher,

(54:04):
and what kind of protections you see how that can
change people's thinking. And that's exciting. But I think you
know it's these are uphill into the wind battles talking about.
You mentioned publications that are worth looking at. This is
semi idosyncratic, So this isn't projects everybody est. This is Andy.

(54:29):
This is Andy speaking here. I love High Country News.
I think they put out a beautiful magazine, a beautiful
print magazine every month. They're online too, but like you
can subscribe to High Country News and you'll get an amazing,
beautiful magazine sent to you every month. I don't know
how they do it on a monthly basis, I think.

(54:49):
And they do a lot of climate coverage, and they
do a lot of interesting climate coverage. I mentioned the
Solutions Journalism Network earlier. I think in terms of climate
online d smog is worth having a look at. Drilled
is another interesting site. I am friends with and a

(55:14):
fan of the work done by the good folks at
Weave News, and we've they're interesting. The weave in Weave
News is the weave between global and local issues, and
so they don't report exclusively on climate crisis, but when
they do, it's always through that distinct perspective of connecting

(55:37):
the global to the local, so they talk about glocal coverage.
I think The Conversation is another place that does consistently
interesting reporting. The Conversation provides a platform for university professors
researchers who are not themselves journalists to do journalistic like reporting.

(56:00):
So it's translational in the sense of it's often taking
a study that a professor or a researcher has conducted
or been part of and turning it into kind of
a news story that's that's easy to understand, that doesn't
require like accessing a professional peer reviewed journal, academic journal.
And then I would say, you know, I mean, I

(56:20):
think programs like yours, Mitch are nine to eleven like
shout out to what you do. It's really important and
it's a way that people can get information and perspective
that they're not maybe otherwise going to come across and
I think that's really valuable, and I want to give
you a shout out for the work you do in

(56:41):
this way.

Speaker 1 (56:43):
Aw shocks, but Andy, thank you because you've shed light
on a lot of things, including opportunities for getting a
better view of what's going on in the world. And
I want to thank you for the time today. It's
been fascinating.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
Thanks Mitch.

Speaker 1 (57:04):
You've been listening to a conversation with the editor at
large Project Censored, Andy Lee Roth, about the underreported environmental
stories of twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four, and
you can learn more and follow a host of links
to background information about all the stories we discussed and
more at projectsensored dot org. That's one word, no space,

(57:26):
no dash Project sensored dot org. The fact that environmental
stories dominate Project Censor's list is an indication of where
we are as a society. Despite clear, incontrovertible evidence that
human generated CO two emissions are causing the planet to
warm beyond the temperatures in which humans evolved and thrived,
the extractive single use industries that dominated the twentieth century

(57:49):
are pushing back harder than ever in a desperate attempt
to survive until well, at last, there's no nature left
to save now. Unfortunately, we face explicit sensors of climate
related information in the United States, but the abandonment of regulations,
support for objective science and investments in green alternatives can
be the last gasp of industrial resistance to change. If

(58:12):
Americans and citizens of all nations insist on complete reporting
that gives them the facts they need to vote for
environmental responsibility, the trumpest gambit, which is already seeing its
frayed and fraying logic fall apart in the face of reality,
will lead to the make or break moment when the
United States is going to be confronted with the existential
question about whether or not we can turn this society

(58:35):
to a sustainable and regenerative future. And we're going to
need plenty of journalism, journalists and active readers and viewers
to spread the word. Andy's comments about the importance of
everyone coming to an understanding of media literacy one oh one,
as he described it, that is the simple act of
questioning carefully. The information we find in the media is

(58:55):
our catalyst for change. Granted, the complexity of media is
always increasing, but that doesn't mean that we cannot embrace
the practices of seeing through the incomplete and often one
sided messages that we encounter hundreds of times a day.
Just asking what's the scientific basis of this climate claim?
Or is the impact of nature described in this article

(59:17):
or TikTok video. These questions can start each of us
on a journey of discovery that can ultimately change the
course of society. Change starts with us, even in an
arrow when we are told that only great men can
steer society in a new direction. In fact, it's citizens,
citizens of the planet who are the ultimate arbiters of value,

(59:38):
values and policy because we pay for the future, and
the cost of failing to make progress falls on all
of us. So I hope you take some time to
visit Project censored dot org to find the independent media
that you can count on, and would you take a
moment to look at other episodes of sustainability in your ear.
We've got more than five hundred shows to share with

(59:59):
your friends, your family, your coworkers. If you take a
moment to write a review on your favorite podcast platform,
it will help your neighbors find us. Folks, you're the
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So tell everyone they can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio,
Audible or whatever purveyor of podcasts goodness they prefer. Thank

(01:00:21):
you for your support. I'm Mettracliff. This is sustainability in
your ear, and we will be back with another Innovator
interviews soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself,
take care of one another, and let's all take care
of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.