Environmental Coverage Considered Elitist

In an interview at Media Matters, Peter Dykstra discusses the corporate decision at the CNN network to downplay science, technology and the environment:

“The biggest issue is that what we covered were perceived to be either elite issues or liberal issues that were of little value if your goal in life is to compete head to head with Fox News,” Dykstra recalled about his CNN days. “You do not need science and technology to compete with Fox.”

Ironically, a recent report at the Project for Improved Environmental Coverage ranked Fox News 9^th out of 30 national news outlets in the amount of environmental stories, with CNN ranked near the bottom at 25^th. The report noted, however, that “Fox’s environmental coverage has often been documented and criticized for being biased and misleading.”

Dykstra said that former CNN President Jonathan Klein, who served in that role from 2004 to 2010, was one of several executives who called for a reduction in environmental coverage in order to compete with Fox, even though he believed climate change existed.

“I will give him credit for looking me in the eye and telling me to my face, and he was not the only CNN boss who did this, that he did not consider science and environment coverage to be a high priority,” Dykstra said of Klein, later adding, “It never was hostility, it was more an attitude of ‘that doesn’t work for us, that doesn’t help us beat Fox.’ There was very little if any political push back. In fact, Jon Klein, I recall him saying in editorial meetings on more than one occasion ‘it’s obvious that this is for real, it just didn’t necessarily have a place in CNN’s coverage.’”