Doom-laden Cop26 reporting is more moralising than journalism

This virtuous certainty of climate-change catastrophe needs the challenge of proper democratic debate

Igave up watching television news for most of last week. For somebody who makes a living as a journalist and has lived and breathed politics since late adolescence, that is quite something. This decision was not determined by boredom or anger (although both those things came into it), but by a sense of utter pointlessness.

The broadcast content from Cop26 was not “news” at all. That is to say, it was not an account of things that had happened – actual incidents or facts, or even official responses to real events. What it consisted of, in its relentless entirety, was theorising, prediction and dire warning of impending catastrophe from a conference dedicated to speculation about the future.

Some, or even most, of this hypothesising may have been soundly based, but that was impossible for a lay person to judge because there was no time given for substantive argument or the presentation of evidence. The assumption was that the propositions being put forward – and the conclusions to which they led – were irrefutable.

Maybe so. But what was being proposed as the only possible solution to this problem (the diagnosis of which was beyond debate) were policies whose consequences would once have been unthinkable. Nothing less than a return to the sort of difference between the living standards of rich and poor that has not been seen for generations: an immediate future where only the well-off are likely to be able to heat their homes to the comfortable levels now taken for granted, and only the wealthy will be able to afford fresh meat.

It is truly shocking – and a testimony to the peculiar grip of this narrative on political discourse – that almost no questions have been raised on this point by the Left, which is, if anything, less inclined to question a programme that will certainly affect the quality of working-class lives very seriously. (Could the official Left actually believe that ordinary people are all anticapitalist ideologues who will happily sacrifice their own prosperity for the sake of taking down the corporate carbon emitters?)

My point here is that even assuming that the analysis of the current situation which dominated the Cop26 proceedings (and the news coverage of them) is unassailable and beyond dispute, the response to this problem must still be a matter for political discussion, and in democratic countries that means public examination by the media.

Is net zero the only option? Can we consider whether adaptation to climate change, rather than the attempted elimination of it, might be possible? What precisely would be the cost in quality of life for current populations, many of whom have only just escaped from hereditary disadvantage, of the solutions being proposed?

That was perhaps what was most disturbing about the “news” coverage of last week’s proceedings. Even if you accept without reservation the prognostication repeated endlessly on the conference platform, you might have welcomed ideas for alternative ways of dealing with it. Perhaps there was some such discussion and I missed it, given that I gave up and switched off – but somehow that seems unlikely given the tumultuous unanimity of the coverage I did see.

What seemed positively sinister, as opposed to just annoying, about this conception of “news” was that its purveyors seemed comfortable (positively delighted, in fact) with their role as messengers of moral certainty. There was absolutely no doubt that this consensus on the only virtuous path must replace normal expectations of political disagreement or democratic accountability – even though it raised the prospect of dramatic limitations on life choices for the least privileged, and what are currently considered to be everyone’s rights in a free-market society.

It was quite clear that this was, in fact, the whole point of this organised project that was being called “news”: to present a very contentious set of policies, which elected governments should have been required to justify, in a way that could not be challenged. At particularly awful, self-congratulatory moments, it was like listening to the state broadcasts of North Korea, with one dear leader after another stepping up to the podium to harangue the audience in the same uncompromising, coercive terms – while the mob of supposed “protesters” outside demanded even greater (and quicker) deprivations.

This phenomenon is not new, of course. The control of a news agenda and the manipulation of public opinion with morally loaded messaging has been around for a long time and is thought to be justified, even in free societies, by dangerous circumstances. It happens traditionally in wartime, and more recently it has been a feature of the government’s management of Covid. We know now that the use of fear and moral inquisition attached to a doom narrative can compel people to give up their freedoms with very little resistance.

So what have the politicians and the activists who seek to influence them learnt from this? That if you induce precisely the right mix of anxiety and guilt, you can get populations to do what you want, without any democratic process or martial force required.

Occasional problems may arise when the doom imperatives contradict one another: just when climate campaigners demand that we live in super-insulated, draughtproof homes, the NHS tells us to open windows to disperse Covid particles. That’s the trouble with politics (and news coverage) that is based on constructed narratives rather than actual life. It just assumes that governing is all about what people can be persuaded to believe at any given moment.

Tim Davie, the director-general of the BBC, announced last week that climate change wasn’t a political issue anymore. So presumably the lifechanging ramifications of coping with it don’t rate much airtime.

I understand why politicians in power like crises: they make opposition parties appear irrelevant if they support government measures and irresponsible if they oppose them. But surely that should be enough to arouse some journalistic suspicion?

It was like listening to the state broadcasts of North Korea, with one dear leader after another stepping up to harangue the audience