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MEDIA MONOPOLY FUELS CLIMATE DENIAL  
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George Monbiot
November 14, 2025
The Guardian
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_ The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of
communication are owned or influenced by the very rich _

, Illustration: Thomas Pullin/The Guardian

 

If this were just a climate crisis, we would fix it. The technology,
money and strategies have all been at hand for years. What stifles
effective action is a deadly conjunction: the climate crisis running
headlong into the epistemic crisis.

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

Let’s start by recognising that they were never robust. There was no
golden age of public knowledge, no moment at which the information
most people received was largely unbiased and accurate. Throughout
modern history, European societies have formed a broad consensus
around blatant falsehoods: such as the view that the monarch embodied
all the interests of the nation, that women were unsuited to public
life, that Black and Brown people were inferior beings, that empire
was a force for good. A vast infrastructure of persuasion was built
around these beliefs. Public knowledge is always shaped by power.

The promise of democracy was that the lives of all would steadily
improve as knowledge spread: we would turn our gathering understanding
of the world into social progress. For a while, in some places, we
did. But that era now seems to be coming to an end.

The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of
communication are owned or influenced by the very rich
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If democracy is the problem capital is always trying to solve,
propaganda is part of the solution. Like the kings and empire-builders
of the past, they use their platforms to project the claims that suit
them and suppress the claims that don’t. This means boosting right
and far-right movements, which defend wealth and power against those
who wish to redistribute them.

In the US, we witness a rapid and extreme hardening of this position,
as Trump’s allies, old and new, sweep up legacy media platforms
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– it seems obvious that the result will be ever more unhinged
attacks
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on anyone who challenges capital.

The ultra-rich have also pumped money into new media, such as the
online shows that now outrank traditional television news. For
example, two fracking billionaires have poured $8m
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(£6m) into PragerU and $4.7m into the Daily Wire, to extend the reach
of these platforms.

Of the world’s 10 most popular online shows, a Yale study
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shows eight have spread climate science denial. Joe Rogan, who hosts
one of the world’s most popular shows, has repeatedly claimed
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that the Earth is cooling, drawing on research that says the opposite.

A new investigation
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of Elon Musk’s X by Sky News found that every account set up by
reporters, “no matter their political orientation, was fed a glut of
rightwing content”, much of which was extreme. The experts it
consulted believe this pattern could have resulted only from an
algorithm engineered for this purpose, and that “an algorithmic bias
must be decided by senior people at the channel”. (X, for its part,
told Sky News it was “dedicated to fostering an open, unbiased
public conversation”.) A separate study
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spread of misinformation on X is most associated with politicians on
the radical right: mainstream or leftist representatives are far less
likely to spread falsehoods. The radical right leans heavily into
climate science denial and obstruction of environmental measures: this
is why it is sponsored
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by fossil fuel companies
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Capital has willing workers even in the media that aren’t owned by
billionaires. A devastating new article by Peter Coviello, professor
of American literature at the University of Illinois, records how he
and his former college became collateral damage
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in the campaign waged by the New York Times against Zohran Mamdani,
now mayor-elect of New York City. Coviello explains a process grimly
familiar to climate scientists: equating expert opinion with
commentary from paid lobbyists. No attempt is made to examine “the
relation between those two ‘sides,’ or their histories, or their
sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority”. If, he argues,
you have the money to fund a junktank, it will produce whatever
opinion you request, then papers such as the New York Times will
balance that opinion against decades of academic study, as if the two
things are of equal weight.

This also describes the BBC’s understanding of “impartiality”.
While it no longer provides a platform for outright climate denial,
almost every day it breaks its own editorial guidelines by hosting
Tufton Street junktanks
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(which often argue against environmental action) without revealing who
funds them. Shouldn’t we be allowed to know whether or not they are
sponsored by fossil fuel companies?

The BBC told its presenter Evan Davis to stop making his own podcast
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about heat pumps, on the grounds that discussing this technology meant
“treading on areas of public controversy”. Why are heat pumps
controversial? Because the Energy and Utilities Association, which
lobbies for gas appliances, paid a public affairs company
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to make them so. The company, WPR, boasted that it set out to “spark
outrage [[link removed]]”. The
media, BBC included, were all too happy to oblige.

None of this has obliged any BBC executive to resign. Nor did the plan
discussed by former director general Tim Davie and former head of news
Deborah Turness to alter “story selection and other types of output,
such as drama” to “address low trust issues
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with Reform voters”. Nor did editing an interview with Jeremy Corbyn
to produce a misrepresentation
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serious than Panorama’s edit of a speech by Donald Trump. Nor did
its mock-up of a Soviet propaganda poster featuring Corbyn, using the
classic Stalinist image of a rayed red dawn
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think of an occasion on which anyone at the BBC has had to resign for
misrepresenting a leftwinger. But the appeasement of the right
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ends, and nor will it ever be satisfied.

In this media climate, it’s not surprising that governments are
retreating from climate action. In June, a review by the International
Panel on the Information Environment found that “inaccurate or
misleading narratives
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in the media about climate breakdown create “a feedback loop between
scientific denialism and political inaction”. The results can be
seen at the current Cop30 climate talks, whose president, André
Corrêa do Lago, remarks on a “reduction in enthusiasm
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among rich nations.

It didn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of a deliberate and
systematic assault on knowledge by some of the richest people on
Earth. Preventing climate breakdown means protecting ourselves from
the storm of lies.

_George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist_

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* Climate Change
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* Climate denial
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* media
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* monopolies
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