The New York Times Does its Part--for Climate Inactivism

The climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann has written of climate "inactivism"--a shift on the part of opponents of action on the problem of climate change from relying principally on denying the existence of climate change to ward off such action to a more variegated and in many respects subtler strategy. Yes, the inactivists admit, climate change exists after all, and yes, it is caused by humans--but it is a small problem, too small to worry about so much about it for now; or we've blown our chances to do anything about it and so can only "grieve" over what we have lost; or any number of other things that all have in common the effect of undermining the will to do something about the problem in one way or another (the trivializers by encouraging us to brush it off, the doomists by breaking our wills), which is after all what the opponents of action are really after. And just as when the preferred strategy was denialism, and the mainstream media indulged this with its very selective "both sidesism," that media has been complicit in the promotion of inactivism every step of the way. (It is no accident that expert-on-nothing Jonathan Franzen was able to publish a high-profile piece of doomist propaganda in The New Yorker, that the media so loves giving time to Bill McGuire and his counterblasts at those calling out doomism as "appeasers" as, contemptuous of those pointing out how doomism has counterproductively demoralized the public, he tells us that the only thing we have to fear is an insufficiency of fear itself.)

The New York Times has been no exception to this pattern via figures like "hippie puncher" Bret Stephens. Perhaps mindful, perhaps not, of the banality that "You never get a second chance to make a first impression," he made that first impression on the paper's readership in 2017 with a piece of denialism that outraged it by, in the tradition of "concern trolling," smarmily employing that "singularly obnoxious rhetorical trick" of pretending to share climate activists' goals while working to undermine those activists' efforts. Then as if publishing such a piece were not bad enough in itself the Times' public editor Liz Spayd answered the outrage that column provoked with an astonishingly sanctimonious piece that implicitly equated their readers' questioning the appropriateness of their publishing in their pages the scientifically baseless climate denialism-behind-a-front-of-concern of a very well-known right-wing ideologue playing the all too familiar game--and indeed their simply not taking "at face value" Stephens' long-beyond-bankrupt attack on climate science as an expression of honest "skepticism"--with intolerance of views other than their own that made them stereotypical "contemptuous liberals" all but justifying the sneering of conservatives like Stephens at their kind. ("You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" she all but said.)

All of this was quite controversial at the time, with many across the media remarking the Times' open disrespect for its readers (dare I say, the contempt of which Ms. Spayd accused them?) in a vile cause. One reader particularly prominent in the dialogue, the aforementioned Dr. Mann, canceled his subscription in reply to Spayd's reply. Of course, all this has not altered the Times' conduct a whit, the paper continuing to not just publish Stephens, but often shove his columns in the faces of its readers, which one can, not incidentally, interpret as being in line with the shift in strategy that Dr. Mann described. When Stephens shifted from what he referred to as his "agnosticism" on the subject of climate change to accepting its reality he went from denying the problem existed at all to instead denying that anything should be done about it in an item in 2022 that, very heavy on page-filling graphics that the reader has to keep clicking through, grabs the reader's attention with the remark that "Yes, Greenland's Ice is Melting," after making them click the down button several times to get much more, only then shows the byline as that of Stephens, making yet another case against action on the problem; a piece in which Stephens, while saying "Okay, you've got us, global warming exists," also says, "but we had best leave resolving the problem to the market," certainly not doing anything such as would inconvenience Big Oil et. al., so that nothing really changes, in what Molly Taft called a "bad faith climate conversion" all too much of a piece with the "concern trolling" that sparked the controversy of five years earlier.

Had the editorship of the Times' presented the piece so that its nature was evident at the very top--so that from the first the reader saw that this was just another column by Stephens, and his essential argument clear at a glance, so that those who actually care about the issue would not have looked any further--his writing about his "bad faith conversion" would have been one thing. However, instead they put on a lavish production that gave every impression of being for the sake of forcing on the unsuspecting another round of the inactivism of a Stephens whose outlook and conduct had not discernibly changed one iota in the five years since his hiring, and I do not doubt that this factored into the particular annoyance many felt with the article, with Stephens, and with the paper that hired him and kept him on its payroll in a display of open contempt for its ostensible audience that just goes on and on in a manner all too telling of how the media really works--and accordingly, just who counts with it, and who does not.