Cable news networks gave Obama’s climate speech almost no coverage, despite 97 percent consensus in the scientific community that human influence is helping drive climate change. Although we have a long way to go, Obama touched on several good starting points to get our emissions under control; increasing how much energy we get from renewable sources, better efficiency standards for vehicles, capping carbon emissions, and sparking a global discussion on the same topics. CNN, Fox and MSNBC gave the 39 minute speech only 15 minutes of coverage combined.



Think Progress reports:

While the lack of coverage is shocking enough, perhaps the most astounding media failure of the day was by FOX News, who broke from Obama’s climate speech to interview climate denier Chris Horner. Horner works for the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, and is largely funded by the oil money, including the Koch Brothers and Exxon-Mobil.

Please note that calculated coverage length is taken from only the main channel of each network and does not take into account related or subsidiary media sources.

Climate change isn’t a myth. It isn’t a debate. Despite the pseudo intellectuals attempting to persuade the populace otherwise, there is a huge amount of evidence, and scientific consensus, pointing to human influence affecting climate change. We’re going to consume ourselves out of a planet.

The President’s speech centered around what we can do going forward to limit the damage we will inflict on ourselves in the future — it is too late to really prevent it. In fact, many environmentalists have labeled his plan as being too little too late, but some are still optimistic that this will pave the way for bigger changes.

Also, the internet abounds with accusations saying Obama only used the speech to call attention away from the plethora of so-called scandals his administration has faced over the last few weeks. That seems doubtful, considering his approval rating has only slightly dropped, remains higher than the Republican House, and doesn’t really matter in the end because he isn’t up for reelection anyway. Either way, this issue is something that needs to be addressed — and network media has shown, once again, that it cares for nothing except profitable sensationalism — and their corporate leash holders. It should also be noted that in 2012, news networks gave climate change eight times less coverage than the British Royal Family, so this isn’t the first time they’ve chosen to ignore the issue.