CBS News Leans Into the Climate Connection

For years, most television televisions have neglected to make the climate link with the type of extreme heat exploding a large part of North America this week. During the summer of 2024, for example, when recorded temperatures brutalized outdoor workers, withered crops and aggravation of hurricanes, only 12% of national national television segments mentioned climate change, although its role in the conduct of extremely extreme heat has long been scientifically indisputable.

This week, CBS News decisively broke this model. David Schechter, the national network environment of the network, distributed two parts which left no doubt that the horrible heat distressing tens of millions of Americans is climate change in action. Schechter has also helped viewers understand how such heat focused on climate change can not only harm their health, but also to their wallets.

Schechter’s first story was broadcast on the News from CBS Enir June 24. The viewers met Meghan Crow by Fort Worth, Texas, “who is in his second quarter with his second child,” said Schechter. Looking at Crow during a visit to the doctor, Schechter noted that “during pregnancy, the body loses part of its ability to regulate heat”, which can cause serious health risks. Quoting research from the non-profit central climate, he reported that women in the United States “now experience extremely hot additional days [a year]leading to a greater risk of prior birth and infant mortality. »»

His second floor this week featured Angela Harmon, a cancer survivor who raises a grandson and cannot afford to keep her apartment cool “in the brutal summer of Texas” because climate change causes stronger heat waves. The Trump budget bill, currently being studied in the Senate, would eliminate the low -income energy aid program on which the subsidies of which the Harmon had previously counted, reported Schechter.

The parts were part of a greater increase in climate coverage at CBS. Since Donald Trump won the 2024 elections last November, Schechter and his producer Tracy Wholf, who headed the CBS News Climate Beat team, produced 61 climatic stories, 16 which ran in the evening or the news of morning before the streaming, 24 which were directly streaming, and 22 which were published in the form of digital texts.

What is the secret to obtaining green lights for so many climatic stories?

“We have not presented them as climate stories,” said Wholf to cover the climate now. “We have presented them as political stories, as scientific stories, such as consumption stories. Then we establish the climate link in these stories. ” She and Schechter also seizes the news. “If the prices are the big story of the day, then we will find this [climate] angle inside the prices. The CBS climate coverage occurred even though the owner of the company of CBS News, Paramount, accepted discussion of settlement on the baseless trial of Trump on a 60 minutes Interview with vice-president Kamala Harris last October. Trump’s demand for apology would have led Bill Owens, the first 60 minutes The executive producer, and Wendy McMahon, the former president of CBS News, to resign rather than to agree. “The only thing under our control is to do the best job we can do,” said Schechter to cover the climate now. “And if you look at the more than 60 stories we have done, it would be quite difficult to say that someone is trying to keep us silent.”