Something interesting is happening in the right-leaning UK media. After a summer of relentless heatwaves and droughts, the normally climate-sceptic Daily Telegraph newspaper published a series of articles recently acknowledging that high temperatures were a threat to “homes, nature and food security”, without blaming this on rewilding. Columnist Tim Stanley warned in July that “climate change is real and [that] the Right needs to get serious about it”, triggering a lively debate among readers and eliciting more than 9,000 comments online.
For years, the Telegraph railed against net zero policies and platformed climate-sceptic commentators. But reality is catching up. This summer, you could see the effects of climate change in the UK just by looking out your window. Denying climate breakdown looks increasingly silly.
In Ireland, the media landscape is less pointedly polarised than in the UK. However, we suffer from an epidemic of indifference across much of the print and broadcast media instead, with just a handful of dedicated environment correspondents across the entire industry.
We lost one of those last week when former Irish Times environment editor Frank McDonald died recently after a short illness.
It is impossible to overestimate the impact that McDonald’s journalism had on Irish society, especially those of us coming of age during the bleak 1970s and 1980s. His articles shone a light on the avoidable decay and destruction of our built heritage. He taught us how to speak up for what was precious and irreplaceable. He inspired people to organise and resist the wilful and misguided destruction of our built environment.
His journalistic style was a unique blend of investigative reporting, commentary and campaigning, a mix which would be unusual today. Reading through a selection of his papers, which have been digitally archived by the DCU library, is a reminder of how passionate he was, but also of how frustrated he must have been to clearly see what could have been done decades ago to protect and improve Dublin city.
He set out the case for light rail for Dublin in the late 1970s; he warned about air quality and the health implications of burning fossil fuels in the early 1980s, about climate change in the 1990s. It took decades to get meaningful action on all three. Along with other journalists, he jolted the political system into setting up the planning tribunals of the 1990s, exposing the links between property speculation, bad planning and those notorious “brown envelopes” that greased the palms of many elected politicians during that period.
Today we have new and even bigger environmental challenges that, more than ever, demand fastidious and contextualised reporting. But today’s young adults are not reading newspapers. According to the 2026 Digital News Report published by Coimisiún na Mean in June this year, the youngest adult demographic (18- to 24-years-old) is relying increasingly on social media to get news and information over traditional print or television broadcasts. This group also records the lowest overall trust in general news media (33 per cent, compared to 52 per cent among those aged 65 and older). Among all demographics, but particularly younger people and those older than 65, Facebook is the most used platform to discover news, with news websites and apps behind.
The social consequences of misinformation and the distortion of green policies are starting to unfold before our eyes
Along with this shift in news sources, there is also a marked increase in news avoidance. Almost half of those surveyed in the Digital News Report reported actively steering clear of heavy or distressing topics.
Overall trust in news has fallen sharply, with Ireland recording the second largest drop across all 48 markets reviewed, after the Philippines. AI chatbots are emerging as a news source in their own right, used by 7 per cent of respondents overall and 14 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds, a trend that is only likely to grow. What this means for environmental journalism is that almost every fact has a set of alternative facts that can be presented. In a post-truth world, political leadership matters more than ever, but politicians are probably spending too much time online, along with everyone else.
This would not matter so much if there weren’t so much misinformation and general “slop” on the internet. While overt climate denial and scepticism is increasingly rare in the print and broadcast media, and there are many excellent and authoritative sources of climate information from new media outlets such as Carbon Brief or DeSmog, the internet is fundamentally unreliable as a source of news. And yet, that is where an increasing number of people are getting it.
Social media platforms have transformed the media landscape, and with it, environmental reporting. This has tremendous potential for citizen science, timely responses to environmental pollution and for increasing ecological literacy. But the social consequences of misinformation and the distortion of green policies are starting to unfold before our eyes.
The attention economy is not interested in the deteriorating condition of the natural world.
Sadhbh O’Neill is a climate and environmental researcher
