THE CHURCH OF CLIMATE LOSES ITS PULPIT AT CBS:
Cutting the “climate desk” wasn’t censorship — it was a long-overdue correction to years of sanctimony.
The great tragedy of our time, at least to those who dwell in the climate-alarmist press, is not hurricanes, floods, or famine—but a network trimming its propaganda department. When CBS News laid off most of its “climate crisis” staff, the media class responded as though free speech itself had been outlawed. According to Truthout, “CBS News has fired most of its climate crisis production staff” and, in the process, “gutted” its sacred climate desk. The story was dressed up as an obituary for truth itself, complete with talk of “bloodbaths” and “new conservative management”.
To anyone outside the activist echo chamber, it looked like a normal corporate reshuffling. CBS’s parent company had merged with Skydance, and the incoming leadership did what executives always do after mergers—trim redundancies, change direction, and try to make the business profitable again. But to those who had mistaken climate coverage for a holy mission, this was blasphemy.
At the heart of the melodrama was Tracy Wholf, the now-former head of CBS’s climate desk, who had urged colleagues to insert a line into hurricane coverage reading: “The above-average Atlantic Ocean temperatures, made worse by climate change, helped Melissa rapidly intensify into a category 5 storm.” That suggestion was presented in Truthout as “accurate reporting.” In reality, it was speculative editorializing—a sentence of moral certainty grafted onto a story about weather.
The URL of the above post at Watts Up With That is “cbs-turns-off-the-climate-alarm-clock” – the climate “alarm clock” has been going off non-stop at CBS for about 55 years now. In his 2012 biography of Walter Cronkite, fellow leftist Douglas Brinkley wrote:
At the CBS Broadcast Center in New York, there was a post–Silent Spring belief that the Tiffany Network had an obligation to spread the gospel of the age of ecology. A CBS Reports segment in September 1962 had Eric Sevareid famously interviewing the literary biologist Rachel Carson about the perils of the insecticide DDT at her home in Silver Spring, Maryland. Cronkite, at the time, had been focused on the Earth-orbiting flight of the second Mercury launch. But now that Neil Armstrong had walked on the Moon, Cronkite sensed that ecology would soon replace space exploration as the national obsession. CBS News producer Ron Bonn recalled precisely when Cronkite put the network on the front line of the fight. “It was New Year’s Day, 1970, and Walter walked into the Broadcast Center and said, ‘God damn it, we’ve got to get on this environmental story,’ ” Bonn recalled. “When Walter said ‘God damn it,’ things happened.”
Cronkite pulled Bonn from nearly all other CBS duties for eight weeks so he could investigate environmental degradation. He wanted a whole new regular series on the CBS Evening News—inspired by Silent Spring, the philosophy of René Dubos, and those amazing photos of Earth taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts. The CBS Evening News segments were to be called “Can the World Be Saved?” “We wanted to grapple first with air pollution, the unbreathable air,” Bonn recalled. “But then we wanted to deal with the primary underlying problem, which was overpopulation.”
In January 1970, the promise of a new environmentalism brought about the end of The Twenty-First Century (which had succeeded The Twentieth Century in June 1967). No longer would Cronkite tolerate Union Carbide (a major polluter) as a sponsor. The Texas-based Fortune 500 company was the enemy of “Earthrise,” he told Bonn. At Cronkite’s insistence, CBS canceled The Twenty-First Century to coincide with the debut of the “Can the World Be Saved?” segments.
No one at any of the Big Three networks, with the exception of Charles Kuralt, cared about environmental issues with the passion of Cronkite. By assigning his science producer Bonn, a trusted ally since their trip to South Vietnam together in 1965, Cronkite was getting way ahead of the news curve on the environment. In the mid-1960s, Bonn had done a couple of landmark CBS News Special Reports on global warming and overpopulation. Together, Cronkite and Bonn decided to begin CBS’s coverage of the environment with an eight-minute piece on April 20—two days before Earth Day. CBS Evening News’ graphics department made a special bumper slide for the “Can the World Be Saved?” segment that consisted of Bonn’s hand clutching Earth (a photograph taken by the Apollo 8 crew). “Earth, you understand, wasn’t in the palm of my hand,” Bonn explained. “We were trying to show humanity squeezing the Earth to death.” The image became synonymous with the CBS Evening News, essentially the show’s visual calling card.
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The Nixon administration’s top environmental lawyer, William Ruckelshaus, who in December 1970 became the Environmental Protection Agency’s first administrator, believed that Cronkite’s coverage was a key factor in getting Nixon to back a spate of environmental legislation in the early 1970s. “Once Cronkite got on the environment, everybody started talking about it, worrying that we were destroying America,” Ruckelshaus said. “Back when Sevareid interviewed Carson, the environmental problem was in black and white. By 1970, with Cronkite’s ongoing ‘Can the World Be Saved?’ series, the belching smog and landfills and burning rivers were in color. That’s what grabbed the public’s attention.”
Sandy Socolow, along with many others at CBS News, thought that Cronkite had gone eco-mad. Riled up about polluters, Cronkite was, as Socolow put it, the “grizzly bear” at CBS who insisted that the ecologically charged “Can the World Be Saved?” be a prime feature on the Evening News. “Walter was almost a nutcase about the environment,” Socolow recalled. “He was really, really bothered by big companies’ pollution and the destruction of America’s natural resources. Everybody bemoaned that their stories were getting crowded out due to Walter’s need for a new environmental awareness. He was over the top, a real pioneer in getting the mass media to profile American landscapes being desecrated.”
Many of the CBS News technicians and producers thought that Cronkite was going a little gaga with his “Can the World Be Saved?” obsession. Whenever Cronkite ran an ecology story, the “Earthrise” graphic would appear behind him, with Bonn’s hand holding the planet. CBS Evening News director Ritchie Mutchler would regularly bark to his assistant, “We’ll need the hand job tonight!” To CBS News correspondent Bob Schieffer, it was akin to “Quiet on the set!” Feeling that he was being mocked, Cronkite, usually unflappable, called Mutchler aside. “Uhmm, could we call that thing something else?” he asked. “Every time I hear you call it that, my mind sort of wanders.”
I don’t know, I think “hand job” nicely sums up the masturbatory theme of radical environmentalism quite nicely.
Speaking of “Earth Day:” Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of [2024].
55 years on, to paraphrase the late Kathy Shaidle on Trump as Hitler, I’m already on (at least) my fourth apocalypse: