This piece was published in the Irish Echo on June 21.
“Blame Canada!” was the New York Post’s Page 1 headline on Thursday, June 8, with the subhead being, “Canuck wildfires plunge NYC into eerie smoky hell.”
“Don’t Blame Canada,” responded Heated, a reader-funded newsletter from journalists focused on the issue of climate change.
The piece by Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson had the subhead-intro, “If anything, we should be blaming fossil fuel companies for the climate-worsened wildfires filling U.S. air with smoke.”
One commenter on the newsletter, missing the point, pushed back, “Why are you pretending the Alberta Tar Sands Petroleum industry doesn't exist?”
But Atkin and Samuelson weren’t saying that Canada is blameless in the area of climate change; rather, they were highlighting coverage that avoids any mention of the issue in the spread of wildfires, and the particle pollution that comes with the smoke.
The Post’s article said that the city’s usual air quality index is about 50 in June [between 0 and 50 is “good” on the AQI and 50 to 100 is “moderate”] and on Wednesday afternoon, June 7, it spiked to 484 out of 500 on the AQI, due to smoke from the “uncontained Quebec-area wildfires,” making it the most polluted city in the world.
The only reference the Post’s coverage made to climate change was in a short piece headlined “AOC Exploits Wheeze Woe,” which opened with, “As wildfire choked New York City, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the air quality crisis to push progressives’ costly Green New Deal.”
At least it mentioned that position, although AOC and many other reasonable people might suggest that not allowing for the centrality of climate-change science is a form of disinformation.
(Interesting, then, that in an historical time-loop sort of way, “Canuck” should make an appearance in this regard — the so-called “Canuck Letter” was the ultimate piece of disinformation, a forgery concocted in the Nixon White House and aimed at undermining Democratic Senator Ed Muskie, a presidential hopeful. It said he’d referred to French Canadians in his state of Maine by that pejorative term.)
The Wall Street Journal, on the posher end of the Murdoch media empire, has to take the issue a bit more seriously — or the paper’s straight news division does anyway. A June 8 story on Page A5 was headlined, “Wildfires Jump Globally as Climate Heats Up,” and the subhead was, “Hotter temperatures dry out forests in the Northern Hemisphere, triggering vast burning.”
The WSJ’s opinion pages, however, were back on right-wing message by Friday with environmentalists being the “main culprit" for raging fires, according to an editorial, because, apparently, they resist the thinning of overgrown forests.
The Economist, a voice of reason, when compared to the WSJ’s editorialists at least, reported on June 17, “Canadian wildfires started earlier than usual this year and have burned ferociously ever since. On one day alone the area burnt in Canada was around 200,000 hectares (or 0.5m acres). That is greater than the total area burnt by wildfires in California last year, according to David Wallace-Wells, a writer on climate change.”
The Economist piece ended, “It would only take a change in the wind to make it America’s problem once again.”
