From Us Climate on the Ballot September 23, 2024

Reporting Tips from CCNow’s Climate on the Ballot Summit

Journalists focused on climate and politics shared their view of the beat. We hosted conversations with international, national, and local journalists, and an interview with John Podesta, senior climate advisor to President Biden.

By CCNow
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Every Monday, in “Climate on the Ballot,” we pass along a topic to help you integrate climate into your newsroom’s campaign reporting. Consider sharing this newsletter with your colleagues on the politics beat. Vea la versión en español de “El clima en la boleta.”

This Week: Practical Tips for Covering Climate-Politics From Fellow Journalists

During CCNow’s three-day Climate on the Ballot Summit, journalists who regularly integrate political and climate reporting shared tips for how to elevate the climate stakes of this election, when so much coverage tends to focus on horse-race polling and campaign gossip. They talked about what works and doesn’t to capture editors’ and audience’s attention, and what stories most need reporting in the six weeks before Election Day. To cap the summit, White House senior climate adviser John Podesta spotlighted the role of local news in telling the climate story. (Watch video)

In our opening panel, NPR’s Neela Banerjee, NBC News’s Chase Cain, The New York Times’s Lisa Friedman, and Capital B News’s Adam Mahoney dug into how climate is embedded in nearly every election issue, offered practical tips for cross-desk collaboration in newsrooms, and offered up ways to cope with disinformation on the campaign trail. (Watch video)

In our local panel, Miami Herald’s Alex Harris, Inside Climate News’s Aman Azhar, The Arizona Republic’s Joan Meiners, and CBS News Texas’s Brian New talked about how they are holding local officials accountable for their climate records, connecting climate to other major local concerns (such as health), and the climate stories that break through ideological divides. (Watch video)

In our international panel, we heard from the Guardian UK’s Natalie Hanman, Ritwika Mitra in India, and Iván Carrillo in Mexico. They analyzed coverage of elections in each of their climate-critical countries this year, offered advice about what connects with audiences and how to get your newsroom on board with this coverage, and shared the climate-politics stories they want to see from their US counterparts, given the outsized global climate implications of the US election. (Watch video)

Reporting Ideas From Our Panelists

Spell out the climate angle in top election issues. Making the climate connection this election season is easier than many journalists might realize, whether it’s healthcare, food prices, or immigration, noted Chase Cain. “All the top issues in this election have strong links to climate change.”

Adam Mahoney emphasized the point: “We’re working with a disenfranchised population that is facing issues that supersede any election inequities, that are hundreds of years in the making. Those issues — about just putting food on your table, having a roof over your head — are always going to be number one on the docket” but the climate connections “are there, and obvious, whether we’re thinking about the [property] insurance crisis in the Gulf Coast right now… or even our food map in the way that that has been impacted by contamination and storms.”

Get your politics and climate desks talking. The New York Times’s Lisa Friedman talked about how teams work together in her newsroom. “Pretty much every day,” she said, “reporters or editors [from other desks] in their morning meetings are talking with our colleagues [on the climate desk] about what they’re covering and does climate have a place in it.”

Being both “diplomatic and a little bit annoying” can convince newsroom colleagues to run such stories, said Natalie Hanman, the Guardian’s head of environment. “Making someone a cup of tea” before presenting your case is one option, and so is telling the morning story meeting, “I really think it was a big miss yesterday,” if such a story was overlooked.

Go the extra mile with fact checks — and explain the why of the lie. While fact checking the debate, Chase Cain found “articles from five, six years ago, where we had already fact checked” that windmills don’t cause cancer, for example. Rather than repeat the fact check, he added federal data showing “that solar and onshore wind are the two cheapest forms of electricity,” because many voters this year say that the economy is their number one issue. Neela Banerjee shared that NPR audiences “really respond to you pulling back the curtain and showing not only what is being said, and [that] it’s wrong, but why are people saying this? What are the interests promoting certain narratives?”

Investigate how Project 2025 might impact environmental justice initiatives in your community. Adam Mahoney urged journalists to investigate the potential ramifications of Project 2025 proposals for climate and environmental justice initiatives recently put in place in communities across the country, such as climate resilience hubs.

Meet your audiences where they’re at. Local outlets “sometimes have the attention of readers that might not otherwise go searching for” climate change information, said The Arizona Republic’s Joan Meiners. She aims to tell a range of stories that will appeal to different audiences — one story might be for climate skeptical audiences who nevertheless want to understand more about rising heat, while another is for audiences “way past that and want to know what we can do about it.” To get started, take a local climate issue (eg., extreme heat and workers or hurricanes and house insurance) and explain what’s at stake, the possible policy solutions, and what candidates say they’ll do.

Take Inspiration

Panelists recommended pieces that tell the climate-politics story

Spotlight Piece

Watch White House senior climate advisor John Podesta discuss climate policy at last week’s summit.