ABC, CBS and NBC Evening News Reports on Canadian Wildfires Ignore Climate Change’s Role Entirely

A snapshot of how Bad Things Just Happen with no cause and no author.

Last night, the three major networks did reports on the ongoing health risk for tens of millions in North America caused by Canadian wildfires, and none mentioned climate change’s role in making these large fires more likely and more severe.

CBS Evening News did a 22-second segment, NBC News did a 1 min and 45 second segment, and ABC World News did a two-minute report. None of them mentioned climate change at all. 

Here we have an urgent, visceral, and frightening example of how climate chaos will affect millions of people, and it’s presented as a Random Nature Story with no cause or compounding factor resulting from human-created climate change. It’s just a Bad Thing that Just Happened. 

One throwaway line in Emilie Ikeda’s NBC Report lends itself to a comment on climate change, but this important context is conspicuously left unmentioned. Ikeda informs the viewer that “the number of [Americans] experiencing at least one day of poor air quality has increased 27 fold in the past decade,” which is an objectively outrageous and bleak statistic to throw out without explaining why this 27-fold increase has taken place or what forces are causing it. Clearly something has happened in the past decade? What is it? What’s driving a 2,700% increase in poor air quality days?

OK, What caused this?

That escalating climate chaos will result in more frequent and devastating wildfires is beyond dispute. Last year, a landmark United Nations report concluded that the risk of wildfires around the world will surge as climate change intensifies. According to the New York Times:

It is a stark warning about the increased heat and dryness that human-caused global warming is bringing about. Nations and localities need to prepare better for the dangers, the report’s authors said… 

“The heating of the planet is turning landscapes into tinderboxes,” said the report, which was published on Wednesday by the United Nations Environment Program. The report, produced by more than 50 researchers from six continents, estimated that the risk worldwide of highly devastating fires could increase by up to 57 percent by the end of the century, primarily because of climate change.

So how is this key context ignored entirely from these reports? Two minutes is an eternity in TV news time. The reports could have at least had a single line about how climate change will make these images more likely. And, indeed, as NBC News casually throws out without naming names, they already are. The most important task for any journalist should be to ascribe blame where blame exists—otherwise the reporting has little moral utility and simply invites political impotence and Oh, Dearism. These aren’t stories of earthquakes or asteroids hitting earth. These are, in large part, human-made crises with human-made solutions. And these solutions become that much more difficult to rally support for when the public isn’t told that the brown smog outside their house is connected to the extraction and burning of fossil fuels by other humans looking to get rich off our collective climate disaster.