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Climate Activists

8 23 mostly for direct action targets

note july record heat waves

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Right-wing media are spreading calls for violence against climate activists in response to a series of disruptive but nonviolent direct actions carried out by groups demanding action on climate change.

As communities grapple with crippling heat, flooding, and wildfires, activist groups employing tactics such as throwing paint or food on famous works of art and property, infiltrating cultural events, and obstructing busy roads have provoked outrage from right-wing media. Most recently, a U.K.-based group called Just Stop Oil and a German group called Letzte Generation (Last Generation) have been violently attacked by civilians, many of whom are motorists seemingly being held up by group members sitting in the middle of roads or conducting “slow walk” protests to block traffic. The incidents captured on camera have gone viral on social media, with some right-wing media figures in both Europe and the U.S. justifying these assaults and praising the perpetrators, offering ominous warnings of future violence against climate activists.

U.S. right-wing media fan the flames of anger and aggression directed at climate activists in response to escalating tactics abroad

On July 19, Just Stop Oil posted a video of a 21-year-old protester getting dragged, punched, and kicked while slow-walking down Cromwell Road in London. A statement from Just Stop Oil said that the victim of the assault did not plan on reporting the incident to the police. A July 21viral video of a woman yelling at Just Stop Oil protesters reportedly shows her telling them she is taking her baby to the hospital. In response to these tactics, changes in the recent Public Order Act have expanded police powers, giving authorities much more leeway to determine a protest is disruptive and put an end to it.

The videos sparked a deluge of comments from right-wing media influencers in the U.S. justifying and even encouraging physical violence against climate protesters who obstruct traffic:

During two separate incidents in Germany involving Last Generation, a truck driver attempted to run over a sitting protester and a group of people violently threw protesters out of the road, dragging one of them by the hair. (On Twitter and YouTube, the latter video was considered to be so violent that it either violated community guidelines or was labeled asinappropriate content for some viewers.)

While road obstructions seem to elicit the most aggressive reactions, activist groups across Europe, the U.K., and the U.S. have also been heavily criticized for gluing themselves or throwing paint and various food products at notable works of art (the artworks have not been permanently damaged).

The right’s yearslong mission to turn the public against environmental activists

Right-wing media have spent years building their audiences’ disdain for environmentalists, particularly those who dare to speak out about climate change as a serious threat.

During extensive coverage of climate protests, for example, Fox News has portrayed activists as members of a narcissistic, mentally ill “death cult” (a term that right-wing media and conspiracy theorists have used to describe Planned Parenthood, Judaism, and the Democratic Party) with the sinister agenda of fixing an allegedly fake problem at the peril of regular people.

As far back as 2010, right-wing media was blaming the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on environmental activists. And as youth movements like Fridays for Future gained notoriety and media attention in 2019, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles was calling then-16-year-old Greta Thunberg a “mentally ill child,” and multiple influencers have compared her to Nazi leaders.

“Like, I'm not going to be the only one who could see, like, little, sort of, imagery of Hitler speaking up there, right?” right-wing YouTuber Dave Rubin said on The Rubin Report. “Like, there was some –these people think that they can control the worldand if you just gave them enough money and enough power they could do it.”

Fox News prime-time host Laura Ingraham has warned viewers that they would “be punished by our own children” and compared youth climate activists to Stephen King’s Children of the Corn.

COVID-19 brought a whole new onslaught of accusations as reduced travel saw planet-warming pollution plummet. Right-wing figures likefossil fuel shill Daniel Turner and radio host Rush Limbaugh claimed that “green activists” were rejoicing over the COVID-19 pandemic’s disastrous effects because the disease was “accomplishing the Green New Deal’s goals.” Fox News and the New York Post parroted the idea.

In 2022, right-wing media found a way to blame the war in Ukraine on climate activists, demanding they were responsible for the domestic and global policies that supposedly emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin because the White House is “capturedby climate zealots.” More recently, Fox Business host Charles Payne compared climate activism to human sacrifice on July 13. And on July 17, The Five co-host Greg Gutfeld said that climate activists “see population as pollution” and suggested doxxing them to make their lives more difficult.

By claiming over and over again that climate activists want people to suffer and suggesting that they represent the real threat to society, not climate change, right-wing media have conditioned their audiences to be complacent or even satisfied when protesters are targeted with violence. This kind of thinking didn’t happen overnight — it’s been building for years, buoyed by right-wing talking heads, who get engagement by goading people into acting on their worst impulses but insist they’re not inciting violence, and the corrupt institutions driving ecological collapse and creating the need for civil disobedience to secure a livable future. 

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the past year has seen a global surge in climate activism, spurred by the escalating climate crisis, including controversial actions such as throwing paint and food at venerable works of art, bringing bustling city traffic to a halt, and disrupting major athletic competitions, among others.

A Media Matters analysis of coverage by major national TV news networks and the top five U.S. newspapers by circulation reveals a troubling trend: Coverage of such disruptive climate protests over the last year was not only limited, but also heavily skewed, often focusing on the disruptive tactics of the activists rather than the urgent climate message driving their actions. Coverage also rarely pointed out the increasingly hostile and punitive response from police and governments that these provocative tactics have increasingly drawn.

From May 30, 2022, to July 31, 2023, Media Matters found:

For example, in the week leading up to Earth Day 2023, broadcast networks allocated just over 3 hours of coverage to the global event and less than an hour on Earth Day itself. But when it comes to more confrontational climate actions, the media attention is hardly consistent or proportional.

Climate activists engaged in civil disobedience are often portrayed merely as disruptors, with the news media failing to adequately communicate the grave climate concerns that drive their actions. Furthermore, the intensifying government responses to these acts of dissent — from heightened policing to punitive legislation aimed at deterring future activism — are frequently sidelined in the reporting, creating an incomplete picture of the full stakes involved in these protests.

From May 30, 2022, through July 31, 2023, broadcast TV news networks aired just 7 segments about various climate protests. ABC aired 4 segments about climate protests, followed by NBC with 2, and CBS with 1. None of the corporate broadcast networks’ segments about climate protests referenced scientific warnings about climate change or mentioned the escalating legal reprisals against controversial climate actions.

During the same period, CNN and MSNBC aired 36 segments about climate protests, with 7 mentioning scientific warnings about climate change. CNN aired 26 protest segments, with 4 climate science mentions, followed by MSNBC, with 9 segments and 3 mentions.

One of the better segments connecting climate protest to climate science aired during the April 23 episode of *CNN Newsroom Live*, which used the occasion of Earth Day to discuss the dual strategies climate activist group Extinction Rebellion was deploying to draw attention to the crisis and also included a detailed accounting of the climate threats facing the planet.

MSNBC was the only cable network to air a segment that mentioned the legal backlash against climate activists. Ayman Mohyeldin, host of MSNBC’s Ayman, explicitly denounced the jailing of climate activists during a November 13, 2022, segment about imprisoned Egyptian journalist and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s hunger strike during the United Nations’ COP 27 climate conference.

The host declared, “Look, there is no environmental justice without social justice. Governments cannot tackle the world’s climate needs with sobriety and urgency, while simultaneously imprisoning young activists around the world who are at the very forefront for the calls for change.”

Despite these notable exceptions, broadcast and cable networks have largely provided limited and decontextualized coverage of climate protests. Most of their coverage focused on the art protests, specifically Just Stop Oil activists who threw soup at Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery in London last October. The activists who used charcoal to dye the Trevi Fountain in Rome black in May also received coverage from mainstream TV news outlets.

This reporting often neglected to connect the activists’ provocative methods to the pressing climate concerns propelling their actions or to mention the intensifying government reactions to these protests. This incomplete representation creates an information vacuum, conveniently filled by right-wing media, which could further skew public understanding of the climate crisis and its advocates.

Overshadowing its mainstream cable news competitors, Fox again dominated cable news coverage of climate protests during the studied time period. The network aired 144 segments, which is four times CNN and MSNBC’s combined coverage. Fox also covered a much wider variety of climate protests than its cable news counterparts, with numerous segments abouts the demonstrators who protested the Congressional Baseball Game last July, the activists who deflated dozens of SUV tires in Boston in April, and the protesters who interrupted Wimbledon in July.

In 8 segments, Fox also explicitly denied or downplayed the climate emergency driving the activists’ actions. For example, during a segment that aired on the May 22 episode of *Fox News Tonight* about Roman climate protesters who dyed the Trevi Fountain black to draw attention to the link between fossil fuel consumption and devastating floods in northern Italy, correspondent Trace Gallagher noted, “Historians inconveniently remind the protesters that the rain drought pattern in northern Italy has been happening for thousands of years, maybe millions.”

Fox’s coverage routinely mocked and derided climate activists. For example, during the May 23 episode of Fox News’ *The Five*, co-host Jeanine Piro called the Trevi Fountain protesters “lunatics” and asked, “Is there something off in their brain that makes them do this?”

During the June 1 episode of *Fox & Friends*, Fox host Carley Shimkus said it was “positively hilarious” that one of the climate protesters who interrupted a Swedish dance competition had been deliberately hit by a piece of camera equipment, before the hosts mused about assaulting hypothetical protesters who happened into the Fox News studio.

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade again wished violence upon climate activists during a July 6 segment about a protest that disrupted Wimbledon, saying he hoped that security “roughed up” the protesters.

The Washington Post led with 15 total articles about climate protests, 7 of which mentioned the scientific warnings about climate change; the Los Angeles Times followed with 7 articles with 4 mentions; The New York Times ran 6 articles with 2 mentions; The Wall Street Journal ran 2 articles with no mentions; and USA Today ran 1 article with no mentions. The New York Times and The Washington Post were the only top five newspapers to mention the legal reprisals against climate protesters, with 3 and 1 mention, respectively.

The coverage within the United States' leading newspapers revealed diverse, often conflicting narratives, where nuanced insights coexisted with more surface-level stories about climate protests, even within the same publications, creating a stark contrast in the way the protests were presented to readers.

For example, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post each published several articles that examined the ominous scientific warnings about climate change fueling the urgency of the protests, providing readers a more complete understanding of the activists' cause. However, these same newspapers also published other articles that ignored the larger story of the climate crisis and focused on the protesters’ tactics. The lack of context in these pieces clouded or obscured the urgent message that activists sought to convey. This mixed approach underscores the need for more consistent, comprehensive, and empathetic reporting of climate protests that reflect the gravity of the issue at hand.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal’s 2 print articles about climate protests during the studied period were uniform in their condemnation of the activists and their tactics. The right-leaning newspaper is owned by the Murdoch family, which also owns Fox News among a number of other right-wing media outlets.

Regarding legal reprisals, The Washington Post published a strong editorial on June 16 that decried the Vietnamese government’s imprisonment under false pretenses of Hoang Thi Minh Hong, who is described as “the country’s leading climate activist.” And a July 12 New York Times article about various climate protests at museums noted that the United States was approaching a “tipping point” as “prosecutors have brought serious federal charges against protesters who threatened the safety of art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which is a federal institution.” But such coverage remains sparse.

The increasingly oppressive response to provocative climate protests, characterized by brutal policing and punitive legal measures, reflects a broader trend in criminalizing dissent to deter protesters and inhibit the global mobilization efforts of environmental movements.

This dearth of coverage not only overlooks an alarming pattern of legislative hostility toward current iterations of climate activism, but it also ignores the array of so-called “critical infrastructure” laws crafted to penalize environmental protests that have been enacted across numerous states. These laws, often advocated by the fossil fuel industry and their proxies, propose severe penalties for protests near fossil fuel infrastructure and prescribe hefty fines for organizations supporting such actions, and they have already caused a great deal of harm among the U.S. climate activist community.

In January, 26-year-old Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán was killed by law enforcement officers during a raid on the Defend Atlanta Forest encampment. Other forest defenders have subsequently been charged with domestic terrorism for protesting the construction of a police training facility in Atlanta, dubbed “Cop City.”

Meanwhile, during protests of the construction of the Line 3 pipeline project in Minnesota, a thousand-mile crude oil pipeline from Canada to Wisconsin, the Enbridge pipeline company paid police officers to harass and mass arrest climate activists and entangle them in complex and expensive legal proceedings.

And choosing to focus sparse coverage of climate protests on the disruptive tactics of activists can have further harmful implications. By portraying protesters as threats rather than as citizens responding to an existential crisis, media narratives provide fodder for right-wing outlets and social media influencers to rationalize violence. This escalates risks for frontline climate activists and adds to the pervading environment of fear and intimidation.

Unfortunately, significant incidents and policy changes often go underreported. For instance, the United Kingdom introduced draft legislation posing unprecedented restrictions on the right to protest, yet this development received little attention in mainstream media.

Similarly, several American states have passed laws that exonerate drivers who hit protesters with their vehicles, a frightening development considering similar incidents in Australia andGermany.

National news media bear a substantial responsibility for reporting on climate protests with depth, substance, and accuracy, especially given the torrent of harmful narratives from right-wing media outlets such as Fox News which frequently seek to distort and diminish the urgency of climate change. Mainstream news outlets must thus strive to provide comprehensive coverage that transcends a narrow focus on protest tactics and emphasizes the scientific underpinnings of the protests, the heightened legal repercussions faced by activists, and the increased criminalization of these vital expressions of dissent.