CBS News Leans Into the Climate Connection
Since Trump’s election, the network has produced more than 60 stories on the climate crisis.
David Schechter
(Sheckmojr)For years, most TV newscasts have neglected to make the climate connection with the kind of extreme heat blasting much of North America this week. In the summer of 2024, for example, when record high temperatures brutalized outdoor workers, withered crops, and worsened hurricanes, only 12 percent of US national TV news segments mentioned climate change, though its role in driving such extreme heat has long been scientifically indisputable.
This week, CBS News decisively broke that pattern. David Schechter, the network’s national environment correspondent, aired two pieces that left no doubt that the ghastly heat afflicting tens of millions of Americans is climate change in action. Schechter also helped viewers understand how such climate change–driven heat can hurt not only their health but their pocketbooks too.
Schechter’s first story aired on the CBS Evening News on June 24. Viewers met Meghan Crow of Fort Worth, Texas, “who’s in her second trimester with her second child,” Schechter reported. Watching Crow at a doctor visit, Schechter noted that “during pregnancy the body loses some of its ability to regulate heat,” which can lead to serious health risks. Citing research from the nonprofit Climate Central, he reported that women in the US “now experience 12 additional extremely hot days [a year], leading to a greater risk of pre-term birth and infant mortality.”
His second story this week featured Angela Harmon, a cancer survivor who’s raising a grandson and can’t afford to keep her apartment cool “in the brutal Texas summer” as climate change drives stronger heat waves. The Trump budget bill now under consideration in the Senate would eliminate the Low Income Home Energy Assistance program whose subsidies Harmon previously relied upon, Schechter reported.
The pieces were part of a larger surge in climate coverage at CBS. Since Donald Trump won the 2024 election last November, Schechter and his producer Tracy Wholf, who heads the CBS News Climate Beat team, have produced 61 climate stories, 16 that ran on the evening or morning news broadcasts before also streaming, 24 that went directly to streaming, and 22 that were published as digital text stories.
What’s the secret to getting green lights for so many climate stories?
“We haven’t pitched them as climate stories,” Wholf told Covering Climate Now. “We’ve pitched them as politics stories, as science stories, as consumer stories. Then we make the climate connection within those stories.” She and Schechter also seize on breaking news. “If tariffs are the big story of the day, then we’re going to find that [climate] angle inside tariffs.” CBS’s standout climate coverage has occurred even as CBS News’ corporate owner, Paramount, agreed to settlement talks over Trump’s baseless lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris last October. Trump’s demand for an apology reportedly led Bill Owens, the former 60 Minutes executive producer, and Wendy McMahon, the former CBS News president, to resign rather than acquiesce. “The only thing in our control is to do the best work we can do,” Schechter told Covering Climate Now. “And if you look at the 60-plus stories we’ve done, it’d be pretty hard to say that someone is trying to keep us quiet.”
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