🔗 Share this article

If we were only facing a environmental emergency, we would fix it. The technology, money and approaches have long been available for some time. What stifles meaningful progress is a dangerous intersection: the planetary emergency colliding directly into the crisis of knowledge.

Defining the Knowledge Crisis

An knowledge production crisis is a crisis in the production and delivery of knowledge. It concerns what we know and how we know it, what we agree to be true and what we identify as false. We face, in addition to a global threat to our life-support systems, a global threat to our knowledge-support systems.

Looking Back: No Golden Age of Public Knowledge

First, we must acknowledge that these systems were never strong. No perfect period existed of public knowledge, no moment at which the information the public consumed was largely unbiased and accurate. In recent centuries, Western nations have formed a broad consensus around obvious untruths: such as the view that royalty represented national interests, that women were unsuited to public life, that people of color were lesser humans, that colonialism brought benefits. A vast infrastructure of persuasion was built around these beliefs. Common understanding is always shaped by authority.

Democratic Promise

Democracy's pledge was that the lives of all would steadily improve as knowledge spread: we would convert our accumulating knowledge of the world into social progress. For a while, in certain nations, this happened. But that era now seems to be coming to an end.

Core Issue: Wealth Control of Media Platforms

The central issue is the following: that the majority of channels of communication are controlled or shaped by the very rich. When democracy poses challenges capital is always trying to solve, misinformation becomes a tool. Similar to monarchs and colonizers of the past, they utilize their media to project the claims that benefit them and suppress the claims that don’t. This means boosting conservative and extremist groups, which defend wealth and power against those who wish to redistribute them.

Changing Information Environment

In the US, we witness a rapid and extreme hardening of this stance, as political allies acquire traditional news outlets – it seems obvious that the outcome will include increasingly unhinged attacks on those questioning wealthy interests.

Billionaires have also pumped money into digital platforms, including the digital programs that now outrank conventional broadcast journalism. As an illustration, two fracking billionaires have invested substantially into multiple outlets to expand the influence of these platforms.

False Climate Narratives

Of the world’s top digital programs, multiple studies show several have spread environmental misinformation. Popular hosts have frequently asserted that global temperatures are dropping, drawing on research that says the opposite.

New research into digital networks found that profiles were provided excessive amounts of particular narratives, much of which was radical. Analysts conclude this likely emerged from deliberate programming, and that such bias must be decided by senior executives.

Systematic Misinformation

Additional research found the dissemination of falsehoods is strongly linked with politicians on the radical right: mainstream or leftist representatives are far less likely to circulate untruths. The radical right leans heavily into environmental skepticism and obstruction of environmental measures: this is why it is funded by fossil fuel companies.

Media Complicity

Powerful interests have cooperative participants even in media outlets that aren’t owned to billionaires. Expert examination records how experts became unintended victims in media campaigns against public figures. This method is grimly familiar to environmental researchers: equating expert opinion with commentary from paid lobbyists. Little effort is made to examine the connection among different perspectives, or their histories, their funders, their scientific credibility.

Public Broadcasting Challenges

This also describes certain broadcasters' understanding of “impartiality”. While they no longer provide space for complete environmental rejection, regularly they violate internal policies by hosting certain thinktanks without revealing their financial backers. Don't we deserve to know whether or not they are sponsored by energy corporations?

Media executives have told presenters to cease producing educational content about environmental technologies, on the grounds that discussing this technology meant “entering disputed territory”. Why are these technologies controversial? Because commercial groups hired PR firms to make them so. These firms claimed that they set out to “spark outrage”. The media, including public broadcasters, were all too happy to oblige.

Results and Ramifications

None of this has forced any media executives to resign. Neither did editorial decisions designed to “build confidence” with specific voter groups. Nor did accountability regarding misrepresenting public officials through modified conversations or manipulated visuals. It's difficult to recall of an occasion on which any executive has had to step down for distorting a leftwinger. But the appeasement of the right continues endlessly, and and their demands remain insatiable.

Global Impact

Amid this information environment, it's understandable that governments are retreating from climate action. Global assessments have found that “false or deceptive stories” in the media about environmental collapse create “a feedback loop” between scientific denialism and government paralysis. The outcomes can be observed at international climate talks, where delegates remark on a “decline in commitment” among wealthy countries.

Conclusion: Systematic Assault

It didn’t happen by accident. It results of a deliberate and systematic assault on information by some of the richest people on Earth. Stopping environmental collapse means protecting ourselves from the storm of lies.