More than 60 news outlets worldwide have signed on to Covering Climate Now, a project to improve coverage of the emergency

Source: The Guardian joins a major media initiative to combat the climate crisis | Environment | The Guardian

News outlets worldwide have agreed to participate in a global propaganda messaging campaign about The Guardian’s “Climate crisis” and “emergency”.

This effort became visible this past week in advance of a UN climate meeting next week, with newspapers throughout the world coordinating in their advocacy journalism.

Seattle Times adds a prominent “belt” to their main web site page:

Some of the related stories illustrate the problem with coordinated advocacy journalism. Emotions take precedence over facts (Seattle Times):

He goes on to illustrate by envisioning a distant future and scary scenario that is a product of his imagination:

When “independent” media agree to engage in identical advocacy journalism to adopt someone’s agenda, that is the definition of a coordinated propaganda campaign.

One of the most powerful ways media shape the public’s perception is through what stories they choose to cover and what stories they choose to ignore. A newspaper can engage in propaganda by leaving out information – the so called “error of omission”. In this example, the media intends to saturate news coverage with stories about climate, many of which rely on emotional anecdotes, human interest and scary scenarios.

The goal is to engage you emotionally, to engage your System 1 emotional thinking rather than your System 2 rational thinking style.

This type of propaganda messaging is obvious to many readers and may dissuade them from paying attention. Indeed, this campaign may backfire – badly.