By Katie Myers for Grist.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for West Virginia News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

When politicians and planners think about climate adaptation, they’re often considering the hard edges of infrastructure and economics. Will we divert flooding? Should we restore shorelines? Can we fireproof homes? Folklorist Maida Owens believes such questions don’t capture the full picture. When climate disaster comes for the diverse Cajun and Creole fishing communities of Louisiana’s islands and bayous, it has the potential to tear their cultural fabric apart.

“There’s more to community resilience than the physical protection of properties,” Owens, who works with Louisiana’s state folklife program, told Grist. 

Radical change is already occurring. Louisiana’s coast is slowly being swallowed by the sea; the Southwest is drying out; Appalachia’s transition from coal has been no less disruptive than a recent battery of floods and storms. These crises, which are unfolding nationwide, interrupt not only infrastructure, but the rituals and remembrances that make up daily life.

The study of those rituals and rememberances may seem like an esoteric discipline, one relegated to exploring quaint superstitions of the past or documenting old men in overalls playing homemade instruments. It’s true that those who study and preserve folklore don’t concern themselves with high art — that is, the sort of thing supported by networks of patronage and philanthropy and gallery exhibitions. Their mission is to record the culture of ordinary people: us. Our jokes, our songs, our spiritual practices, our celebrations, our recipes. Such things are the glue that holds society together, and as the climate changes our ways of life, Owens and her peers say, it’s important to pay attention to how culture adjusts. 

Doing that goes beyond the practical question of how people will carry their heritage into a world reshaped by climate change. It requires looking to tradition-bearers — the people within a community who are preserving its customs, songs, and stories and passing them on — for clues to how best to navigate this tumultuous time without losing generations of knowledge. In that way, folklorists across the country increasingly strive to help communities adapt to a new reality, understand how tradition shifts in times of crisis, and even inform climate policy. Folklore doesn’t seem like it would teach us how to adapt to a warming world, but even as it looks over our collective shoulder at the past, it can prepare us for a future that is in many ways already here.

In the coal towns of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, Emily Hilliard has written extensively on this idea, which she calls visionary folklore. She looks for ways to sustain culture as those who practice it experience incredible change so that they might “send traditions on to the future.” As climate disaster threatens to wipe away entire towns and ways of life — both literally, in the case of the communities lost to the floods that ravaged Kentucky in 2022, and figuratively through the loss of archives and museums to those inundations — she considers this continuity an essential part of retaining a sense of place and identity, two intangible feelings that help give life meaning. 

“Folklorists can help communities pass on these traditions,” she said.

Hilliard is a former West Virginia state folklorist who has, among other things, collected oral histories, songs, artwork, and legends for the West Virginia Folklife Program. It’s impossible to talk about climate in Appalachia without talking about coal, and the communities she has documented have a gnarled and thorny relationship with that industry, which has both sustained them and helped create the climate impacts they’re left to grapple with. 

People, Hilliard said, face a grave risk in “the way that climate disaster breaks up communities, so that communities may no longer be able to share food and music traditions.” Visionary folklore is, in part, about trying to restore, replace, and sustain these things, while finding ways to bulwark and adapt traditions for an uncertain future.

Climate change, like the coal industry that fostered it, threatens to rewrite some of the region’s cultural memory. Hilliard recalls members of the Scotts Run Museum in Osage, West Virginia, a place where town elders regularly play music, tell stories, and share meals, talking of rising floodwaters threatening their community gathering spaces. She sees collaboration with communities to preserve these important community resources as part of her life’s work.

As she strives to help communities sustain old traditions, Hilliard sees new ones emerging as coping strategies for a world in which foundations are shifting. As floods have repeatedly swept through Appalachia, she has seen communities come together to repair and replace family quilts, musical instruments, and other heirlooms and keepsakes, some of which were painstakingly crafted by hand and many of which have been handed down through generations. Community members in Scotts Run established “repair cafes” where people with various skills helped neighbors recover. Coal company towns’ often hardscrabble existence made such expertise necessary, and in an era of looming environmental destruction, those knowledge pathways allow people to simultaneously come together to grieve and to begin to rebuild their community. Such things are not limited to Appalachia, of course.

“There may exist beneficial practices and adaptations to crises within our historical and current practices,” said Kimi Eisele, a folklorist with the Southwest Folklife Alliance in Tucson, Arizona. Eisele, who is beginning a folklife project focused on climate change, manages Borderlore, a journal operated by the Southwest Folklife Alliance. It recently received a $150,000 grant to collect oral histories that amplify the environmental history and future of the Southwest through the eyes of Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and other historically excluded people.

In southern Arizona, where Eisele lives and works, triple-digit temperatures, aridity, and groundwater depletion present a dire threat to agriculture and even long-term human settlement. Many of the interviews Eisele and others have collected focus on the impacts of climate change on Indigenous traditions and how those traditions are changing. The Tohono O’odham, whose ancestral land is divided by the border with Mexico, have for example long relied on willow for basket-weaving, but as farms and groundwater diversion have lowered the water table, willows have dried up and died. Basket-weavers now use the hardier yucca plant. Climate change is also causing traditional adobe homes to crack and decay; Native architects are working to shore them up and explore how modern technology can preserve them, even as the structures provide a model for building cooler, more energy-efficient homes. 

The interviews describe adaptations made over millennia that still work – mind-boggling, perhaps, to a society that has managed to nearly deplete its resources in just a few hundred years. The Hopi, Tohono O’odham, Diné, and other peoples have weathered climate fluctuations, droughts, floods, and famine in the tens of thousands of years they’ve lived in the Southwest. Hopi farmer Michael Kotutwa Johnson, who raises corn, believes that heritage provides essential tools for adapting to the climate crisis. He is working to ensure others learn to use them.

“As Hopis, we adjust to these environmental fluctuations,” Johnson told Eisele in an interview for the Climate Lore oral history series. “It’s part of our faith.” Even if this period of climate crisis is unprecedented and unpredictable, Johnson says, he feels prepared to bear it out.

Johnson is a dryland farmer, meaning he uses traditional farming methods that don’t require irrigation. He relies on the annual monsoon to water his fields, and on what he knows of the land to prepare for the season ahead. In 2018, for example, he realized early on that a drought was intensifying because “biological indicators that usually appear in April weren’t there,” he told Eisele. “Plants weren’t greening up, so we knew the soil moisture wasn’t going to be there.” In response, he and other Hopi farmers planted only a quarter of their usual crop to avoid depleting the soil. What he describes as “bumper” years can take communities through leaner times — if everyone is careful and pays attention. 

“We’ve had a system in place to handle a lot of it. We plant enough to last three to five years,” Johnson told Eisele. “When you have everybody doing that, then you have to have a good supply to get through climatic changes.” 

He hopes other farmers, particularly Native farmers, collaborate in practicing regenerative agriculture rather than relying on destructive groundwater withdrawal to maintain crops the desert simply can’t support. Eisele finds stories like Johnson’s invaluable in helping people everywhere adapt. “We are really looking at folklife as a tool for liberation,” she said.

Along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Maida Owens, takes such work a step farther, trying to use folklore to shape public policy and make the world more welcoming toward those displaced by the climate crisis.

The Bayou State has been losing up to 35 square miles of coastland each year for the better part of a century. As erosion and rising seas have remade the state, entire communities have had to move. Climate migration, new to some parts of the world, is as much a fact of life for Louisianans as the changing of the tides.

Even as Louisiana has focused on reclaiming lost land and restoring coastal wetland, Owens has urged special attention to adaptation, teaching people in harms’ way how to adjust their ways of life without losing what’s most important to them. She works with the Bayou Culture Collaborative, which brings together tradition bearers from impacted communities to talk “about the human dimension of coastal land loss” so residents, and their elected leaders, can better plan for the migration already afoot. Research has shown that when people make the difficult decision to pack up and leave, most of them go only a few miles. 

“People from all over the coast are starting to leave and move inland,” Owens said. In the parlance of her field, the places they leave behind are “sending communities”; where they’re headed, “receiving communities” await them. Owens has begun to convene meetings online and in receiving communities to discuss cultural sensitivity to help people prepare for their new neighbors, knowing that migration can exacerbate class and racial tension. 

In the Louisiana folklife program’s ongoing “Sense of Place – And Loss” workshop series, Owens hosts discussions about the future of bayou traditions to collectively imagine what the near future might look like as the Gulf Coast changes. Artists, other tradition bearers, and community leaders are invited to envision how they might make their towns and counties more welcoming for climate migrants, and Owens assists them in developing concrete action plans. Such an effort includes having receiving communities inventory their cultural and economic resources to see what they can offer newcomers, invest in trauma-informed care for disaster survivors, and consider what they might need to make themselves ready to integrate newcomers.

The Louisiana state coastal protection and restoration authority has identified some towns that might have the capacity, and need, for more people; many of these places have the space but lack the social infrastructure to support the continuation of rural peoples’ foodways and artistic traditions. Though receiving communities may not be far away, those most vulnerable to displacement are often Indigenous, French-speaking, or otherwise culturally distinct, and moving even a short distance can expose them to unfamiliar circumstances. In her workshops, Owens is proposing ideas lifted in part from the adaptation strategies immigrants often rely upon, like cultural festivals and an emphasis on cultural exchange and language education. In a recent project, several coastal parishes (what Louisianans call counties) near Terrebonne created a collaborative quilt at a regional community festival as a way to draw attention to the beauty and ancestral importance of their wetlands and deepen their connections with one another.

That’s where Owens hopes folklorists can affect policy change, too. Owens is keeping a close eye on the state’s Coastal Master Plan, providing feedback with an eye towards supporting the culturally rich, and vanishing, coastal parishes. The Louisiana Folklore Society has urged the state to conduct its planning with respect to the desires and needs of the people who live on the coast, prioritizing engagement before any major mitigation project, and saving habitat not merely for its inherent value but also for its importance to the coastal tribes it sustains.

Though climate disasters have already thrown towns along the Louisiana coast and beyond into disarray and prompted seismic changes in how residents live, this is just the beginning. As floods and fires, droughts and erosion, and the myriad other impacts of a warming world wreak greater havoc, some of the answers to the crisis won’t be found in engineering or science, but in the cultural fabric that binds us together.


Katie Myers wrote this article for Grist.


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By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Maine News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Last month the U.S. Department of Justice indicted two employees of Russian-state funded news outlet RT, formerly known as "Russia Today," for paying a content creation outfit called Tenet Media to push a wide range of climate misinformation on social media. Included in the raft of misinformation are false social media posts downplaying the very real climate impact of meat, according to a new report from the group Climate Action Against Disinformation, CAAD.

The Russian government wants no part of climate action - including the kind that shifts diets from meat-heavy to plant-rich - political researchers surmise. While Tenet's site has since gone dark, these influencers continue to post misinformation on social media channels, including Rumble, X, YouTube and TikTok.

Social Media Influencers Spread Misinformation About Meat's Climate Impact

In the report, the climate disinformation researchers looked at 69 websites and social media accounts belonging to Tenet Media and its founders, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, and six affiliated content creators, from September 1, 2023, to September 23, 2024. During that time, influencers with over 16 million combined total followers and subscribers made 183 total posts nabbing 23,555,000 views and 1,048,902 shares and likes. According to the indictment, Chen and Donovan were aware the funds were coming from Russia. Still, the influencers characterize themselves as "victims" of the campaign.

Some of the misinformation content was, and continued to be monetized, according to the report. Some examples include mocking prominent climate activists, such as Greta Thunberg, as well as standing up against "disruptive" lifestyle changes, like replacing gas stoves with electric models, and eating less meat. Eating a more plant-forward, less meat-heavy diet is one of the most effective forms of individual climate action, according to Project Drawdown, a non-profit aiming to help the world reduce carbon emissions.

Other posts feature the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates is trying to rid the world of animal farming and replace livestock with lab grown meat and bug burgers, while others claim Americans are "revolting" against the United Nations' call for western countries to cut back on meat consumption.

From Buzzfeed Reporter to Pro-Trump Influencer

One notable content creator associated with Tenet, Benny Johnson, posts often, though not accurately, on the topic of meat-eating. Johnson falsely characterizes voluntary recommendations to shift diets towards eating more plants as authoritarianism. In his 2023 video regarding the UN's food system road map, Johnson said that "fascists" want to rid Americans of their self-governance and autonomy, in part by taking away their meat.

"The purpose of this is control," Johnson said. "If they can control your food supply, if they can control your energy supply, if they can control your transportation, then you don't have freedom. You are a slave."

The facts: meat has a massive climate impact. Meat and dairy production are responsible for between 11 and 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and is a documented drain on our planet's water and land reserves, and a leading cause of deforestation and ocean degradation. But efforts to change meat consumption are not mandatory.

At the same time, Johnson creates branded content for meat companies, while telling followers to "Eat like an American," and offering discount codes. Meat companies use Johnson as a spokesperson to sell their products, and just last month, Johnson shared a video entitled "Women eat raw steak to support Trump."

Johnson wasn't always a right wing influencer. He was once considered a credible journalist, working for Buzzfeed covering "viral" American politics. He was fired by the outlet in 2015, for plagiarizing 41 articles. One year later he was accused of plagiarism again, by the conservative outlet Independent Journal Review.

Why Russia Wants Climate Misinformation to Proliferate

Russia is the world's fourth greatest emitting country, and is warming four times faster than the Earth. Yet according to its own government, Russia benefits from climate change and from maintaining global reliance on fossil fuels - an approach debunked by scientists.

Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, the RT staffers named in the U.S. indictment, allegedly paid out nearly $10 million to the Tennessee company to "create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging," by contracting online influencers with big audiences. They have since been charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Though the company is not named in the indictment, it is described as "a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues" - which is also how Tenet is known to describe itself.

For now, the named content creators - Matt Christiansen, Tayler Hansen, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Lauren Southern (who traveled to Russia in 2018 to meet with and make content with neo-fascist philosopher and Putin ally, Alexander Dugin) - all say they didn't know their efforts were being paid for by Russian operatives. They describe themselves as the "victims" of the Russian scheme. But the evidence continues to stack up. CNN reports the creators were specifically recruited for their right-wing leaning content, as the RT employees hoped to "plug in to the commentators' vast network of fans to exploit divisive narratives that achieved the Kremlin's goals."


Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient.


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By Jessica Kutz for The 19th.
Broadcast version by Alex Gonzalez for Arizona News Connection, reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Hazel Chandler was at home taking care of her son when she began flipping through a document that detailed how burning fossil fuels would soon jeopardize the planet.

She can't quite remember who gave her the report - this was in 1969 - but the moment stands out to her vividly: After reading a list of extreme climate events that would materialize in the coming decades, she looked down at the baby she was nursing, filled with dread.

"'Oh my God, I've got to do something,'" she remembered thinking.

It was one of several such moments throughout Chandler's life that propelled her into activist spaces - against the Vietnam War, for civil rights and women's rights, and in support of other environmental causes.

She participated in letter-writing campaigns and helped gather others to write to legislators about vital pieces of environmental legislation including the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, passed in 1970 and 1972, respectively. At the child care center she worked at, she helped plan celebrations around the first Earth Day in 1970.

Now at 78, after working in child care and health care for most of her life, she's more engaged than ever. In 2015, she began volunteering with Elder Climate Action, which focuses on activating older people to fight for the environment. She then took a job as a consultant for the Union for Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization.

More recently, her activism has revolved around her role as the Arizona field coordinator of Moms Clean Air Force, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. Chandler helps rally volunteers to take action on climate and environmental justice issues, recruiting residents to testify and meet with lawmakers.

Her motivation now is the same as it was decades ago.

"When I look my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren, my children, in the eye, I have to be able to say, 'I did everything I could to protect you,'" Chandler said. "I have to be able to tell them that I've done everything possible within my ability to help move us forward."

Chandler is part of a largely unrecognized contingent of the climate movement in the United States: the climate grannies.

The most prominent example perhaps, is the actor Jane Fonda. The octogenarian grandmother has been arrested during climate protests a number of times and has her own PAC that funds the campaigns of "climate champions" in local and state elections.

Climate grannies come equipped with decades of activism experience and aim to pressure the government and corporations to curb fossil fuel emissions. As a result they, alongside women of every age group, are turning out in bigger numbers, both at protests and the polls. All of the climate grandmothers The 19th interviewed for this piece noted one unifying theme: concern for their grandchildren's futures.

According to research conducted by Dana R. Fisher, director for the Center of Environment, Community and Equity at American University, while the mainstream environmental movement has typically been dominated by men, women make up 61 percent of climate activists today. The average age of climate activists was 52 with 24 percent being 69 and older.

Part of the gender shift, she says, can be traced back to the mass demonstrations and protests that flourished in response to former President Donald Trump.

"Starting with the Women's March and the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump ... women are more engaged and women are more likely to be leaders," Fisher said.

"Which is nice, because especially in the environmental arena it has historically been quite the dude fest."

A similar trend holds true at the ballot box, according to data collected by the Environmental Voter Project, a nonpartisan organization focused on turning out climate voters in elections.

A report released by the Environmental Voter Project in December that looked at the patterns of registered voters in 18 different states found that after the Gen Z vote, people 65 and older represent the next largest climate voter group, with older women far exceeding older men in their propensity to list climate as their No. 1 reason for voting. The organization defines climate voters as those who are most likely to list climate change, the environment, or clean air and water as their top political priority.

"Grandmothers are now at the vanguard of today's climate movement," said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the Environmental Voter Project.

"Older people are three times as likely to list climate as a top priority than middle-aged people. On top of that, women in all age groups are more likely to care about climate than men," he said. "So you put those two things together ... and you can safely say that grandma is much more likely to be a climate voter than your middle-aged man."

In Arizona, where Chandler lives, older climate voters make up 231,000 registered voters in the state. The presidential election in the crucial swing state was decided by just 11,000 votes, Stinnett noted.

"Older climate voters can really throw their weight around in Arizona if they organize and if they make sure that everybody goes to the polls," he said.

In some cases, their identities as grandmothers have become an organizing force.

In California, 1000 Grandmothers for Future Generations formed in 2016, after older women from the Bay Area traveled to be in solidarity with Indigenous grandmothers protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

"When they came back, they decided to form an organization that would continue to mobilize women on behalf of the climate justice movement," said Nancy Hollander, a member of the group.

1000 Grandmothers - in this case, the term encompasses all older women, not just the literal grandmothers - is rooted at the intersection of social justice and the climate crisis, supporting people of color and Indigenous-led causes in the Bay Area. The organization is divided into various working groups, each with a different focus: elections, bank divestments from fossil fuels, legislative work, nonviolent direct actions, among others.

They make frequent appearances alongside other climate activist groups at protests in front of banks like Wells Fargo, which finances oil and gas infrastructure, as well as participating in the annual Anti-Chevron day, protesting at the Chevron Refinery in Richmond, California.

For Hollander, 85, the work has been energizing, a continuation of the political activism she was a part of throughout her life. It's also helped her mentally cope with the multiple crises the world is currently experiencing.

"It facilitates a sense of agency and of me being in concert with my values and my ideals. It also puts me in touch with other people, other human beings, who are motivated by similar desires and commitments," she said.

Many of the activists emphasized how important that sense of community is, especially when the work can lead one into a sense of despair over all that has been lost. Action, they agree, is an antidote, a way to cope with that feeling and show their care. Much of their work centers on protecting the younger generation - from the threats of the climate crisis, but also in activist spaces.

"There are women in the nonviolent direct action part of the organization who really do feel that elder women - it's their time to stand up and be counted and to get arrested," Hollander said. "They consider it a historical responsibility and put themselves out there to protect the more vulnerable."

But 1000 Grandmothers credits another grandmother activist, Pennie Opal Plant, for helping train their members in nonviolent direct action and for inspiring them to take the lead of Indigenous women in the fight.

Plant, 66 - an enrolled member of the Yaqui of Southern California tribe, and of undocumented Choctaw and Cherokee ancestry - has started various organizations over the years, including Idle No More SF Bay, which she co-founded with a group of Indigenous grandmothers in 2013, first in solidarity with a group formed by First Nations women in Canada to defend treaty rights and to protect the environment from exploitation.

In 2016, Plant gathered with others in front of Wells Fargo Corporate offices in San Francisco, blocking the road in protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline, when she realized the advantages she had as an older woman in the fight.

As a police liaison - or a person who aims to defuse tension with law enforcement - she went to speak to an officer who was trying to interrupt the action. When she saw him maneuvering his car over a sidewalk, she stood in front of it, her gray hair flowing. "I opened my arms really wide and was like, are you going to run over a grandmother?"

A new idea was born: The Society of Fearless Grandmothers. Once an in-person training - it now mostly exists online as a Facebook page - it helped teach other grandmothers how to protect the youth at protests.

For Plant, the role of grandmothers in the fight to protect the planet is about a simple Indigenous principle: ensuring the future for the next seven generations.

"What we're seeing is a shift starting with Indigenous women, that is lifting up the good things that mothers have to share, the good things that women that love children can share, that will help bring back balance in the world," Plant said.

The coordination between the two groups is one instance of intersectional work happening in the climate activism space. Though younger climate activists tend to be part of a more diverse movement, Fisher notes the movement is still predominantly White.

"People of color are mobilizing, but in many cases, they're not mobilizing and engaging in activism that is specifically focused on climate," Fisher said. "They may be engaging in work that is more climate justice, frontline community focused or against systemic racism, but it's framed really differently than in most of the groups that are doing this kind of climate work ... so there's still a very big gulf there that needs to be crossed."

Some of the older generation of activists see working on issues surrounding the climate as a way to try and correct some of their generation's historical wrongs.

Kathleen Sullivan, an organizer with Third Act - a national organization started by environmentalist Bill McKibben - said that's part of what has motivated her to become a climate activist in her later years.

"I couldn't live with myself if I didn't because I've been gifted with so much in life, and those gifts have come at a huge price," she said, reflecting on how resource extraction, slavery, genocide, have built this country and led to the climate crisis. "And, when you wake up to that, first you weep and and then you say, 'Oh my God, there's a whole other way to live a life, another way to understand how to be on this planet.'"

Sullivan is one of approximately 70,000 people over the age of 60 who've joined Third Act, a group specifically formed to engage people 60 and older to mobilize for climate action across the country.

"This is an act of moral responsibility. It's an act of care. And It's an act of reciprocity to the way in which we are cared for by the planet," Sullivan said. "It's an act of interconnection to your peers, because there can be great joy and great sense of solidarity with other people around this."


Jessica Kutz wrote this article for Inside Climate News.


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By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for Kentucky News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

When “misinformation” was declared 2018’s Word of the Year by Dictionary.com, the website stated at the time that “the rampant spread of misinformation poses new challenges for navigating life.” The year prior, Collins Dictionary named “fake news” as its word of the year. Misinformation has since proliferated — made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic — as both social and traditional media have become viral vectors for the spread. Two hot topics have become especially susceptible to media misinformation and bias — climate change and our food system.

For readers seeking balance and objectivity on these issues, the current media environment can be tough to navigate. Corporate interests, polarizing politics and social media influence make the truth more and more difficult to decipher. To help readers traverse this challenging media landscape, we asked experts in media literacy for tips on how to spot misinformation red flags. Here’s how to separate fact from fallacy, and truth from conspiracy.

Why Misinformation Exists in Media

Though the concept of misinformation in media might seem relatively new, according to Sander van der Linden, professor of psychology at Cambridge University, and author of the book Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity, this threat to the public has actually been around since the late 1800s; back then in the form of media propaganda.

“A lot of people traced the first example back to the Spanish American War,” he explains, “where there was this sort of fake news about a U.S. tanker that sank, which was blamed on the Spanish even though that wasn’t true.” This false information “swayed public opinion in favor of the war,” he says, and was an early example of what came to be known as “yellow journalism: — journalism based on sensationalism and crude exaggeration. Since then, the problem of misinformation in the media has persisted.

Van der Linden points to cable TV news as the medium that took media misinformation to the next level. “In journalism you have editorial standards, you have fact checkers,” he explains. That’s no longer always the case, he says, as “cable news dropped some of those standards.”

As Flavia Roscini writes in her research for Boston University, “cable news is a business that runs on ratings and advertisements. In order to capture people’s attention, it needs to be engaging. It has, therefore, increasingly blurred the lines between information and entertainment.”

The emergence of social media then blurred those lines further, with “no barriers to entry,” says van der Linden. “Right on YouTube, we have content creators who can say anything now without any type of fact checking. There’s no regard for accuracy.”

John Cook, an expert in the cognitive psychology of climate science denial, says that “by removing gatekeepers [editors, fact-checkers, etc.], social media makes it possible for any individual to potentially reach millions of people.” But, he adds, “it’s worse than that. Misinformation spreads faster and deeper than facts on social media because it’s usually more eye-catching and salacious than dry facts.” And once misinformation takes hold, he adds “it’s notoriously hard to undo the damage.”

With online misinformation spreading quickly, and “more and more by inauthentic accounts and AI generated content,” van der Linden says, “the problem has gotten away from us.”

How to Add More Media Literacy to Your News Diet

The abundance of misinformation in the media today has created an increased need for media literacy among readers and audiences. Media literacy is the ability to critically analyze media content to determine its accuracy and credibility. To do this, says Jon Greenberg, a few steps are required. Greenberg is a senior correspondent for PolitiFact, and he teaches journalism at Poynter Institute.

The first step in looking critically at a piece of media, Greenberg says, is an emotional check-in. “If there’s a sense of, ‘Damn it, I knew that was the case,’ or ‘holy smokes, no way’ shock,” then, he says, the next step is the hardest, but most important: “hit the pause button.”

If media consumers can hit that pause button, says Greenberg, the following step is to then ask who or what the source of the information is. “Then you can ask the question: do they have a dog in this fight? What’s their interest?” Consider whether there are any potential conflicts or financial gains at stake.

The next step, Greenberg says, is to look at the news and interrogate the evidence. “Is it believable? Just because it comes from a group that is, say, the ‘Center for Really Savvy Insights’ doesn’t mean that they are squeaky clean,” he says. “They may not be insightful, and they may not be savvy.”

Judging the credibility of a source is key. “Do they have a setup that allows them to go through internal challenges to make sure that the information is accurate?” Greenberg says that if a source appears to be a “lone wolf researcher” — though they may have a PhD — readers should beware. “If they’re working by themselves, they haven’t gone through the process of having their findings and their conclusions vetted by their colleagues, peer reviewed.” Facts are learned through being challenged, he explains, “and that which survives challenges becomes our accepted truth.”

Finally, Greenberg says readers should be interested in what other people are saying about the topic or story. “Plug the phrase into Google and see what bubbles up,” he says. Look to see if certain advocacy or political groups have taken up the same issue, and what fact checkers and debunkers have to say. “And in this way, you can round out your picture.”

Navigating News on Climate Change

Some topics have become more vulnerable to misinformation than others; particularly those that are polarizing, political or with vested financial interests. Climate change is one of those topics, and Cook says that the tendency of mainstream media to present both sides of a debate has allowed for misinformation on climate science to easily enter the public discourse. Presenting both sides of the argument may be “an appropriate approach when it comes to politics or matters of opinion, but misleads the public when applied to matters of scientific fact.”

For example, “it would be inappropriate to give a flat-earther equal coverage with a scientist from NASA, in the same way it’s inappropriate and misleading to give a climate science denier equal coverage with a climate scientist.” Cook’s research has found this format “gives the audience the impression of a 50/50 debate among the scientific community, when the actual scientific consensus on issues like human-caused global warming is greater than 97 percent.”

Another red flag to be on the lookout for when maneuvering through mainstream news on climate change? The omission of the role food systems, and specifically meat and dairy, plays. A 2023 study conducted by Sentient and Faunalytics revealed that animal agriculture is systematically underreported in climate media coverage; 93 percent of the climate news stories reviewed didn’t even mention it. This, despite the fact that animal agriculture is a leading cause of deforestation, and is responsible for between 11.1 and 19.6 percent of global emissions.

Climate misinformation also makes its way into mainstream media via political leaders promoting false arguments about climate change, Cook adds. “Unfortunately, several studies have found that one of the biggest drivers of changes in public opinion about climate change is cues from political leaders,” he says. “People are tribal and respond when our tribal leaders speak.”

Seeking out peer-reviewed sources is the best way to find reliable information on climate change, Cook asserts — however, he recognizes that asking the public to read technical studies from scientific journals may be a bit much. “There are a number of other authoritative and thoroughly-vetted sources on climate information,” he says, “such as the NASA climate website and the National Academy of Science, which are also written to be accessible to non-scientists.”

Navigating News About the Meat Industry

News covering the meat and dairy industries is particularly ripe for misinformation, as the bias goes deep. Tayler Zavitz, a sociologist and critical animal studies scholar, describes this as an entire “corporate-controlled system” at work, made up of “the media, invested corporations (the animal agriculture industry), and the state.” One result of this system: journalists rarely, if ever, include animal suffering, let alone animal welfare, in their news coverage.

For example, while it is common to see quotes from industry sources, such as farmers and lobby/trade groups, rarely are animal advocates sought out for comment, or are the experiences of the animals considered.

Consider news coverage of barn fires. Often, the stories highlight the loss of money or product, as well as the devastation of the farmers. Reporting on how the animals died, often horrifically, is almost never included. “Readers should look at whether the coverage is written through an anthropocentric lens” says Zavitz. Pointing to our barn fire example, she says, “we often see headlines like ‘No injuries in barn fire,’ but the article will then go on to note that 30,000 hens were killed. So, this sort of discourse highlights the human-focused, capitalist ideology underpinning the mainstream news media, as that animal lives are seen as so insignificant and worthless outside of their economic value.”

Meat and dairy industry groups are also pouring money into academic centers created to train researchers in communicating industry-aligned messages to the public. While food industry funding for public research is nothing new, the focus on “communications” and “public trust” is a more recent and worrying invention, because the emphasis is on the message, rather than on research to improve the way food is produced.

One such example is the CLEAR Center at University of California, Davis created by Professor Frank Mitloehner, a scientist with a long public record of downplaying the climate impacts of meat and dairy. A 2022 New York Times and Unearthed investigation revealed Mitloehner did not disclose the full extent of his industry funding on the center’s website. Yet that revelation did little to discourage livestock industry groups from communications funding, and a similar initiative now exists at Colorado State University. And the pork industry has pledged to fund research to boost “public trust between pork producers and pork consumers,” to address animal welfare concerns.

The blurred lines between industry and public research is tricky for journalists to navigate, but also critical in this moment. A 2023 Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found 74 percent of Americans think — wrongly — that not eating meat would make little or no difference for climate change. The scientific research actually shows the opposite: eating less meat with a plant-rich diet is one of the most effective forms of individual climate action, according to Project Drawdown. When in doubt, journalists should avoid leaning on single studies in their reporting, but look instead for the scientific consensus or what most of the research points to.

The Bottom Line

In a media landscape increasingly saturated with misinformation, the need for critical media literacy is growing. As readers navigate topics like climate change and the food system, skills to discern fact from fallacy are crucial. By questioning sources, examining evidence and seeking diverse perspectives and peer reviewed conclusions, readers can better understand the truth amidst the noise of media sensationalism and industry bias.


Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient.


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