Deez Interviews: Meet the Mother Jones climate reporter breaking through the noise and making sure we don’t get too hung up on plain old hope
Happy Friday, Deezers! This week’s interview is with Mother Jones’ Rebecca Leber. We talked about what it’s like working in an increasingly crowded beat, resisting the urge to overcomplicate things, and how “optimism is different from feeling empowered to change the system” (<--RT to infinity). Enjoy!
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The interviewee: Rebecca Leber (follow her @rebleber!)
The gig: Climate reporter @ Mother Jones
So besides the obvious existential stakes around climate change, what makes covering the environment these days a unique beat?
I’d say a unique part about covering climate change is the challenge of giving it a human touch. Writing about climate change involves a lot of facts and figures — explaining things like global temperature averages and emissions — and it all can seem a little soulless.
Journalists have a responsibility to look at this from a humane lens, and connect the science and victims who’ve lost their homes to a hurricane or fire. Except with climate, there will always be this extra step where the writer has to explain that what we’re seeing isn’t normal, why it isn’t normal, and what to do about it. When you’re reporting about environmental and climate harms, you’re usually talking about a future event unfolding over a longer period of time, like rising sea levels, and the future is not familiar terrain for traditional journalism.
After a while calling it an “existential crisis” starts to sound like a cliche, but really there’s no escaping the environmental beat. So when I cover the fossil fuel economy, I’m also part of a world relying on fossil fuels. Unfortunately that means it’s on mind even when I’d like it not to be: Like buying something packaged in plastics or using a gas stove.
Between the huge official statements like the one from the 11,000 scientists published last month, worldwide school walkouts, Greta Thunberg's work, and even The Guardian's decision to call it a "climate crisis," it finally feels like climate change is finally reaching this level of general awareness in the public discourse. What is it like for you to see that change?
I’ve covered these issues for about eight years now, and at one point I returned from a vacation after a new science report came out and was in this new universe where people around me stopped making jokes about unseasonably warm weather and started freaking out.
When I started out, there wasn’t a ton of competition out there on the beat. A lot of major papers had downsized their environmental desks around 2010, after the financial crisis and the failure of a cap and trade bill. Now, there’s more competition on the beat, so it can be more challenging to break through the noise.
It’s even harder to figure out how to break through and reach an audience that isn’t already heavily invested in this. So much of the political debate hasn’t budged the past 20 years, and a lot of it has grown even more polarized in the Trump era.
Some of the new noise on the beat includes political commentators who fall into familiar patterns of giving equal credibility to “both sides” on whether to act on climate change (like uncritically reporting on ExxonMobil’s embrace of a carbon tax without a ton of context about all its work to disrupt all the attempts to pass one).
Since it’s a more crowded beat now, I do get some room to break away to focus on the areas are not getting enough attention. Lately I’ve been doing more on the money in politics beat and diving deeper into how the coal, nuclear, and oil industries are responding to the public demand for action. One fun story I did this fall was a deeper dive into this wild battle over whether Ohio will really bail out coal and nuclear plants.
There's this cliche in media where journalists who write about climate change get asked about how they stay optimistic (or how everyone in general can stay optimistic). Do people ask you that a lot?
I think the best thing for climate reporting is if it’s no longer considered to be some separate, existential part of news coverage, because a lot of the climate crisis is tied to problems of inequality. The climate crisis is embedded in so much else, including the economy, health, international affairs, and migration.
I have also gotten a lot of “how bad it will be,” or “what can I do?” Optimism is different from feeling empowered to change the system. I have a lot of respect for the journalists and experts who’ve been at this much longer than me, but I think most of the clamoring for hope comes from the communities already invested in this fight.
I worry that most people have too much hope that it will all somehow work out on its own, or that technology will save us, which leads to apathy. In theory, young people should have the least hope because they have the most to lose from climate change, but we’re seeing them now lead waves of strikes and protests instead.
It’s not the job of journalists to make sure people have more hope, or honestly, to lay out all of the solutions. I try to think about my work in terms of accountability journalism and serving as a wakeup call on how the world is missing a critical window to prevent the worst of warming.
In your work, you also make a lot of TV/radio appearances. Do you have any advice for newbies on how to prepare for those opportunities?
It’s okay to own what you don’t know and the imperfections, but always remember you have something of value to share.
I think I’ve learned by way of making mistakes that I prefer to see these as practice — where I play around with the best ways to communicate — than to look at it like I’m studying for a final exam. I find the hardest thing as a writer is to suppress the impulse to overcomplicate what I’m saying or try to memorize too many stats.
One trick is to write out a three central talking points that you can always come back to if you get stuck. Think about how the one thing you want someone listening or watching to come away with if she heard you, and say it, because time on-air is short. And practice on a friend! Or pretend like you’re practicing on a friend who doesn’t know the subject.
Finally, what's a piece you've written recently that you're extra proud of, and why?
Since we were talking about hope and such, I recently wrote a short feature on the Sunrise Movement activists who’ve been trying to answer the question of how you build a broad, effective climate movement led by young people. Their strategy rests on this relatively new organizing approach called Momentum, and I looked at the promise and limitations of their strategy.
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That’s it for this week! Don’t forget to follow Rebecca @rebleber and have an non-overcomplicated weekend.
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