The Associated Press has been running wild with leftist climate change propaganda while being paid millions by eco-extremist organizations.
And yet AP still has the audacity to pretend it’s engaging in objective reporting. [emphasis, links added]
MRC Business analysts found that from Feb. 15, 2022, through Feb. 15, 2023, The Associated Press (AP) pushed climate change alarmism and promoted woke environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts across 64 climate-related stories after the legacy outlet received an $8 million grant from leftist nonprofit organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation, Quadrivium (the activist organization of News Corp. Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch’s estranged son and climate activist James Murdoch), the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation (Walmart), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
AP announced on Feb. 15, 2022, that it would “significantly expand its climate coverage” with the goal to “infuse” the media landscape with climate journalism backed solely by private interest groups.
AP called the new development a “sweeping climate journalism initiative” and claimed in its press release that it would retain “complete editorial control of all content.”
AP also claims on its “About Us” page that it is in the business of “unbiased news,” which is little more than a pathetic joke.
The so-called “journalism” AP has been doing on climate involves behaving like the de facto mouthpiece for its major left-wing donors who have an obsession with pushing apocalyptic climate narratives on the internet.
AP promoted the sentiment of its now-former Vice President Brian Carovillano to justify the potential conflict of interest in receiving the $8 million climate reporting grant from the left-wing groups in a Feb. 16, 2022, article.
AP summarized Carovillano’s claim that “AP accepts money to cover certain areas but without strings attached; the funders have no influence on the stories that are done.”
Carovillano, in this particular case, called the activist investment a “‘mutually beneficial arrangement.’”
AP said in a summary of Carovillano’s views that the outlet just had to get used “to the idea that funders weren’t just being generous; they had their own goals to achieve.”
But having groups with leftist political agendas finance a news outlet’s climate reporting is like having Big Pharma finance a news outlet’s reporting on drugs. This conflict was apparently lost on AP leadership.
“The AP is supposed to be a newswire service, reporting hard news,” Legal Senior Policy Fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute Steve Milloy told MRC Business.
“But it has deteriorated into a climate propaganda outfit for left-wing foundations. The AP routinely reports just one side of any climate story. If it lets its readers know there is another side, that only occurs via bogus ‘fact-check’ articles that are intended for use by climate activists to get other outlets to censor climate skeptics.
“AP imagines that its corruption of the news is excused because it discloses on its website that it is being paid to report one side of every climate story. But its stories are run by other media outlets who don’t make the necessary disclosures.”
Climate Depot founder Marc Morano also ripped apart AP’s unashamed partnership with left-wing groups in comments to MRC Business:
The media is not only ideology in sync with the climate agenda of our government, international organizations, academia, and the billionaire class, but they are also quite literally being paid to promote the climate scare.
AP has received millions from ‘philanthropic grants’ to toss out all objectivity and balance in their reporting. The AP and the corporate media engage in paid press release journalism. The media has zero obligation to serve as watchdogs over government claims or policies and instead regurgitate the approved messaging of their paymasters.
Despite AP’s alleged commitment to “unbiased and fact-based” reporting, it consistently spouted climate change propaganda.
Leftist buzzwords and terms on climate issues appeared across the 64 climate-related articles researched, which framed the stories in a way that made the issue appear apocalyptic.
MRC Business tallied the words in accordance with how many times each term appeared across the articles researched.
The term “Climate Change” appeared a whopping 212 times. “Warming” and “Global Warming” appeared 140 times collectively.
“Extreme(s)” emerged 32 times and “Disaster(s)” and “Climate Disaster” appeared a collective 30 times.
A Dec. 9, 2022, AP story was headlined: “New abnormal: Climate disaster damage ‘down’ to $268 billion.”
AP used a couple of other terms to frame its climate reporting in a way favorable to the left’s narrative: “death sentence,” “net zero,” and “zero.”
The term “death sentence” appeared three times. In one example, AP ran a Feb. 14, 2023, climate change story regurgitating the eco-ramblings of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
AP piggy-backed off Guterres to preach end-of-the-world alarmism: “He warned the Earth is more likely on a path to warming that amounts to a ‘death sentence’ for countries vulnerable to that rise, including many small island nations.”
“Net zero” and/or “zero” popped up 10 times in reference to the unrealistic goal of reaching zero climate emissions.
But as Hoover Institution visiting fellow Bjorn Lomborg pointed out in 2021, such goals are meaningless. Using America as an example, Lomborg stated that if all presidents for the next 70 years followed Biden in cutting emissions, “it will reduce temperatures trivially.”
Lomborg said the reduction would only be a meaningless “0.07° Fahrenheit. And this is through the UN climate model. So, it’s going to be very hard. It’s going to be very costly. It’ll have virtually no impact.”
In an Oct. 6, 2022, op-ed, Lomborg noted that “the climate policy goal of achieving ‘net-zero’ CO2 emissions brings crippling economic pain.”
This was apparently lost on AP, which mindlessly praised a month after Lomborg’s op-ed that “[i]f all human emissions of heat-trapping gases were to stop today, Earth’s temperature would continue to rise for a few decades but would eventually stabilize, climate scientists say.”
Of course, AP didn’t mention the economic impacts of just dropping so-called “emissions” cold turkey in its piece.
But it’s easy to turn climate change into a bogeyman for a news outlet if that outlet is getting paid millions to do so by special interest groups dedicated to woke, leftist causes.
Under “Climate Questions,” AP dedicated a whole series trying to push the doom-and-gloom effects of man-made climate change on planet Earth while suppressing dissent that slams against the leftist narrative.
AP repeatedly laced climate alarmism throughout its articles.
For instance, a Nov. 6, 2022, piece in the AP “Climate Questions” section, waved around propaganda by the incessant climate doom-mongering Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC.)
In the piece, AP raved about how the IPCC “gave a damning assessment of where the world is headed if more isn’t done to curb global warming.” Another piece was headlined: “Climate Questions: Is it too late to stop climate change?”
A February 14, 2023, article regurgitated leftist talking points that rising sea levels are a potential “death sentence” for Bangladesh, China, India, and the Netherlands:
“‘Our world is hurtling past the 1.5-degree warming limit that a livable future requires, and with present policies, is careening towards 2.8 degrees — a death sentence for vulnerable countries,’” claimed UN Secretary-General Guterres.
Another AP article regurgitating IPCC propaganda from Feb. 28, 2022, read:
There is much for the world to fear in Monday’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which bluntly states that the Great Barrier Reef is in crisis and suffering grave impacts from climate change.
AP science writer Seth Borenstein wrote a Feb. 28, 2022, propaganda piece riddled with climate panic.
“Deadly with extreme weather now, climate change is about to get so much worse,” Borenstein claimed in his lede in reference to an IPCC climate report.
“It is likely going to make the world sicker, hungrier, poorer, gloomier and way more dangerous in the next 18 years with an ‘unavoidable’ increase in risks, a new United Nations science report says.”
This is typical of Borenstein’s brand as a so-called “science writer.” Milloy rebuked in comments to MRC Business that “Borenstein is notable in his admitted disdain for opponents of the radical climate agenda.”
Borenstein’s framing was essentially a regurgitation of the eco-political spin spewed by Guterres.
“‘Today’s IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,’ said Guterres. ‘With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change.’”
AP’s Leftist Godfathers
AP’s skewed reporting preaching end-of-the-world climate narratives should come as no surprise given the leftist bent of the organizations that fund it.
…snip…
AP claimed in its “Standards For Working with Outside Groups” webpage that its “core partnership principle is that AP’s journalism will be independent.” It’s unclear who the outlet thinks it’s fooling.
MRC Business intern Renata Kiss contributed to this report.
Read the full post at NewsBusters
The AP is nothing but the typical leftists Propaganda we get from the CNN and the rest of the Daily Fake News Programs the Print and Broadcast Fake News from the Birdcage Liners to the Talking Heads
I worked at Hewlett-Packard for over 30 years including when they were still involved with the company. There is NO WAY they would be pushing this left-wing agenda. Nor would Sam Walton support what the Walton Foundation is pushing. It is disgusting that those who made their money working hard with conservative values to see that wealth used to destroy this country.
The news business has suffered a serious loss of advertising income. The click bait Internet social media morass gets that revenue now. The ink stained Lib left wretches will do anything to survive. Dime a dozen. Accountability ?
We need to look around, listen. Figure it out. So much of what we are witnessing is anarchy. Western society was built by competent hard working people who are mostly gone now. I can imagine their reaction it they were able to see antifa and extinction rebellion in action today.
Think the final scene of Planet of the Apes.