Evlondo Cooper

From late June through July, successive heat waves swept across large portions of the United States, breaking temperature records and placing more than 100 million people at a time under heat alerts. ABC, CBS, and NBC closely tracked the extreme heat as it moved across the country, repeatedly reporting threatened or broken records and warning viewers about dangerous conditions.What the networks did not explain was why these events kept arriving in rapid succession. Instead, viewers saw extensive reporting on dangerous and record-breaking heat without an explanation of how human-caused warming is making such extreme weather more frequent and severe.

Data center fight forced right-wing media to cover environmental justice

As Europe reeled from a deadly heat wave, coverage on Fox News and Fox Business made air conditioning the story, claiming that climate policy had made it harder and more expensive for Europeans to survive the heat.However, extreme heat is becoming more dangerous because of fossil fuel-driven warming, which makes climate policy more necessary. Fox networks instead used Europe’s deaths to argue against climate action, doubling down on the fossil fuel economy that is exacerbating dangerous climate impacts.That argument is already being adapted to U.S. heat coverage. As American heat waves expose the strain on infrastructure built for a less dangerous climate, Fox figures blamed climate policy for making cooling more expensive, attacked climate mitigation and resilience planning, and defended more fossil fuel infrastructure. It is a convenient reversal: Fox casts fossil fuels as the answer to deadly heat, while eliding their role in making extreme heat worse.

Right-wing media could use a quieter 2026 hurricane forecast to downplay climate risk before storms form

President Donald Trump and right-wing media news outlets are falsely portraying the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s decision to move away from its most extreme warming scenario as proof that climate science and climate policy failed. In a Truth Social post amplified across right-wing media, Trump claimed the United Nation’s IPCC had admitted its projections were “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” and argued that climate activism had been used to scare Americans, justify “horrible Energy Policies,” and fund “bogus research programs.”Right-wing media outlets quickly seized on the technical update as evidence against climate science and climate policy, with Fox News and Fox Business using the same frame to attack climate spending, research funding, and emissions policy. However, the revision reflects the reality that the world has not followed the most extreme fossil fuel expansion pathway, partly because clean energy growth and changing emissions trends altered the outlook. 

Environmental justice coverage — reporting that connects the harmful effects of pollution, environmental hazards, or policy decisions to socially marginalized communities — remained nearly absent from corporate broadcast TV news last year, even as environmental risks and pollution exposure affected communities across the country. In 2025, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired just 2 environmental justice segments combined, a further decline from recent years and the lowest level recorded since 2018. The absence of environmental justice reporting is not a gap in topic coverage, but a failure to explain how environmental risk is distributed across vulnerable communities. Broadcast networks aired numerous segments about industrial accidents, pollution, and regulatory changes, but these were typically framed as isolated environmental hazards rather than examined through a justice lens. This coverage failed to explain how environmental harms can compound existing vulnerabilities tied to poverty, racial discrimination,

CBS News is laying off national environmental correspondent David Schechter, reportedly leaving no one at the network dedicated to covering climate change. That means that when CBS does cover the issue, the reporting will be more likely to omit scientific context and elevate misleading or contrarian framing, a shift already visible in the network's limited coverage so far in 2026. 

Backlash from MAHA influencers and podcasters over glyphosate is loud, but they still stop short of breaking with Trump

Fox News and Fox Business coverage of rising gas prices nationwide has singled out California, blaming the state’s climate regulations for skyrocketing fuel costs while downplaying global oil shocks from the Trump administration’s war with Iran.On February 28, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, opening what has quickly become a large-scale and open-ended conflict, started without congressional authorization, that has been widely criticized as an illegal and unconstitutional war of aggression. The U.S. has joined Israel in targeting Iranian leadership as well as civilian and military infrastructure, while President Donald Trump has signaled an explicit willingness to pursue regime change. These attacks have triggered Iranian retaliation, including efforts to restrict transit through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical oil chokepoints, helping drive a sharp increase in global crude prices and U.S. gas costs.Fox's coverage has largely echoed the Trump admin

Corporate broadcast networks again reduced climate coverage in 2025, marking the third year coverage has declined since the networks' high-water mark of 23 hours of reporting in 2022. A Media Matters analysis found that ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 8 hours and 25 minutes of climate coverage across 201 segments, a 35% decline from 2024.This contraction occurred despite geographically widespread and disruptive climate impacts throughout the year, widening the gap between real-world climate risk and the information available to broadcast audiences.Coverage continued to prioritize episodic disaster reporting over sustained attention to systemic drivers of climate change, fossil fuel accountability, scientific context, and the experiences of frontline and impacted communities. Climate mentions were most often tied to discrete events rather than incorporated into ongoing explanatory, accountability-driven, or policy-focused reporting.The second Trump administration's major federal climate rollbacks — whi