Media in Meltdown and Climate in Crisis, with Kendra Pierre-Louis.mp3

[00:00:13] Hey, Hotcakes, welcome to Hot Take, the podcast, where we talk about all the ways we're talking and not talking about the climate crisis. I'm Amy Westervelt

[00:00:23] And I'm Mary Annaise Heglar. And we're so excited to be watching season two today. We had a lot of fun during season one, but we also learned a lot. And we're planning to do things a little bit differently this season.

[00:00:34] Yeah, we're going to have more episodes focused on specific themes and put less effort into doing a comprehensive review of the entire climate.

[00:00:44] We have a newsletter for that. Right.

[00:00:47] And if you're not subscribe to that, look for Sign-Up information in the show notes and on our Twitter. Speaking of themed episodes, I'm really, really excited about this one.

[00:00:56] Me too. This episode, we're gonna be talking about the great reckoning that's happening in media outlets all over the country for the past month. And we have the perfect guest along to talk about that with us.

[00:01:07] We do. Our guest today is Kendra PR Louis, formerly of The New York Times Climate Desk and currently at Gimlet. She is a super smart reporter and talented writer. Also, she is a black woman and there are precious few of us in the climate stories telling space. So I'm especially glad to have her on.

[00:01:24] Me too. Also, I have known Kendra and her writing for ages. I loved her stuff with popular science. I appreciate her hatred of MeOh.

[00:01:36] Same. Same. Yeah, I'm super excited.

[00:01:39] She always really smart take on both the media and climate, which are like our two favorite things to talk about.

[00:01:45] Exactly. Exactly. All right. You think it's time.

[00:01:49] It's time to talk about climate.

[00:02:03] Welcome, Ken Drilled. We're really, really excited to have you on the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you guys so much for having me. Yeah. So I've heard you say before that you've had an unconventional path to journalism. What exactly was that path like? How did you get into journalism and specifically climate journalism?

[00:02:22] So I started getting interested in climate issues sort of when I was in college. But I was an economics major.

[00:02:29] I wasn't a science major or anything, but I did take some classes on sustainable development. And then I graduated, took a bunch of sort of random, not odd jobs, but like jobs that I didn't really know what I was going to do with. So like I worked corporate communications for the Princeton Review for a little bit. And then I moved to France and taught English for a little bit. And when I got back from France, I was working at a job at sort of, um, you know, a public policy NGO, I guess is a good way of freezing it.

[00:02:59] And a friend was like, you never shut up about the environment. Maybe you should do something. So I applied to grad school for Sustainable Development and this tiny school in Vermont, Idaho, and graduated with a masters degree in public policy analysis and advocacy in sustainable development. And originally, when I went into the program, I had this idea that I would like go overseas and travel the world and do development work or something. And when I get out of the program, the one thing that was very good to me is that if we want to do anything about the environment, you sort of have to start jaded states just because of how disproportionate impact is.

[00:03:37] And so after that, I abstract a bunch of jobs, if you like.

[00:03:40] Each one of the times they finished school was sort of punctuated by a recession of some sort or the other. So that is also a factor in the bouncing around in jobs. I was interning with a sustainability consultancy firm after grad school and they had this idea for a book and I got a book deal.

[00:03:56] And shortly after I got a job working at one of the larger museums, New York City kind of doing work that was closer to environmental stuff, but it just wasn't like a great fit.

[00:04:05] So I bounced around a little bit more and finally eventually ended up working for an affordable housing nonprofit, doing more sustainability stuff and communication stuff.

[00:04:13] And at that time does. You're on the time I started freelancing a one hour, I got a mentor through the Society of Environmental Journalism Journalists. The strength of the book. And I started freelancing and I gave myself essentially a year where I was like. Either you make enough money from freelancing so you can quit or you get a job in journalism or you go to journalism scrape and the first you didn't happen. So I went into J school. I applied to a few programs and I ended up getting Mighty, Mighty. I started I'm 18 2015 and I finished in 2016.

[00:04:49] And then from there, it's pretty straightforward. You know, I did like an internship ionize at M.I.T. and then I got a job, a pop star. But it is a lot of bouncing around, a lot, you know, like the first piece I ever got published in a national publication once before I ever went to J school. Right. Yeah, that was it. Yeah. That was like Newsweek, I think. And then I got right before. Right. As I was going to M.I.T., I got published in The Washington Post. But it wasn't sustainable and I couldn't get a job in journalism. So it just meet sort of meet's ends. And then, you know, I, I after I graduated, I did a little bit of freelancing and then pretty quickly went to work for paper science. And then from there I went to the Times and Damit Gimlet.

[00:05:27] So you say like you never shut up about the environment. What were when did you start getting freaked out about the environment?

[00:05:34] I still don't know from freaked out. Maybe I should be. But am I especially interested in. Definitely. From a place of like curiosity and wonder.

[00:05:43] My freshman year. You were my freshman year of college. We were required to take these like freshmen writing seminars and it seemed like they really wanted to encourage better writing.

[00:05:57] But the way that you applied for them was you sort of rank them from one to five. And whichever one fit your schedule is the one that you got. So like you're supposed to pick your classes first and then they would like try and sladden this writing seminar. And the one that I took my second semester was on experiencing the Natural World.

[00:06:13] And the teacher was a writer, but she's also a biologist by training and she would spend every Friday, we would have to go on a field trip. Mm hmm. And, you know, sometimes it just.

[00:06:23] I went to Cornell for undergrad, so it was a month ago, which is pretty outdoorsy. And so sometimes it'd just be like hiking the Borgese on campus. There was a weekend trip or we had to go cross-country skiing and we went.

[00:06:33] Cornell owns its own people's Europe producing lab, basically. OK. It's a very learned guy.

[00:06:43] You really went cross-country skiing during this camping trip. She didn't tell us you were going, but we were like in this forest. And it turns out we're skiing to this Maple sirup lab as they were sugaring. And I got to eat maple sirup out of the boiler fresh for the first time.

[00:07:02] No, I feel like a lot of my thinking and a lot of my injuries kind of.

[00:07:08] Reframed around that class, which was, you know, we definitely talked about some of the problems with the environment and, you know, a lot of environmental catastrophes, I think we read a chapter from Ishmael, but a lot of images like wonder and Joy and getting to experience.

[00:07:22] What would you say is the key difference between a science journalist and a climate journalist?

[00:07:29] I definitely think of myself like I trained. I went to grad school for a science journalism and I definitely anchor everything in the science of climate change, I think. But I think the biggest difference is that, like, I don't just or I try very really not to just stop at the science rate. So I'm not just going to tell you that the Earth has warmed by whatever one point. What I remember at one point one degree Celsius like that isn't particularly useful information for most. All right. Like, I think the biggest difference is that it's not enough to sort of chronicle the changes you need to contextualize it to people so that they understand why it matters and also how it impacts their lives. Yeah, it really, really matters that it's not just a science. You have to weave in culture. You have to weave in context. You have to even history when you're Jammey, tell these stories. Right.

[00:08:20] Right. Yeah. I love that, though, because I feel like that's something that we talk about a lot that like a lot of climate coverage still doesn't do that. And it does stick with just the science and not all of the social implications.

[00:08:34] Yeah. Pressure like. So we think the things that you got when, like, you start off as a journalist in climate science is, you know, like I know how to read a study. Lagu Yeah. Like those kinds of things I think are really, really important. I know whether or not you should report on the study. Right. You know, I've had definitely had fights with editors over whether certain things should be reported on.

[00:08:55] What do you think are the most important climate stories not being told right now?

[00:09:00] So I don't think we're adequately covering solutions months one. I don't think we're, I don't know, recovering solutions. And also, I don't think recovering solutions that aren't sexy.

[00:09:11] Yes. I was just going to say that we are. But it's like all the wrong ones. I don't know.

[00:09:16] It's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we like very sexy, very new. Very tech. Yes. Oriented solutions. And there are lots and lots of things that we can be doing that are not sexy. Where all the efficiency stories. I feel like we never hear about that. Yeah. Weatherization is a really hard one to do. So what's winterization? It's basically your house leaks and it's making it so it leaks. It's insulating. It's like caulking. It's really boring, really basic things that often don't even require that much money. You know, like if you've ever been at a house in winter and you've sort of put the plastic over the windows, to some, that is because those windows are bad or they're not yet properly. Right. So, like, if you just properly insulate your home, you have probably costs. Right. So you're using less energy. So you're reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And you've noticed a different rate like you have, right. Fundamentally changed your life, but your energy bill goes down. So that's just like one that like it's pretty kind of low hanging. And the other thing I think is [00:10:25]we don't talk enough about how much the ways in which we live are embedded in the structures of our society. [6.3s] Mm hmm. So, like, you know, Mary and I live in New York, so we don't have to have a car. Right. I'm guessing we're not.

[00:10:40] Amy Lives is relatively rural, and she kind of had a car and it kind of city like a four wheel drive car because we get 20 feet of snow in box.

[00:10:52] So, like, I can't maybe get the worst of all.

[00:10:57] Well, people were like, I can't believe you have an SUV and you claim to care about the environment. I'm like, I literally I couldn't get out of my house if I didn't have that car, so.

[00:11:08] Right. A little bit like. Yeah. Tied in here. Right. And so how do we make it so that you're right. I did a great lake. Like I think that there's so much focus on individuals and not enough on like a lot of the fact that, like, the reason I don't own a car is not because I'm a good person. Right. It's because I live in New York City. Right. Right. I remember I didn't learn to drive until I was 27. And the year before I learned to drive, a friend was like, oh, I just assumed you didn't know how to drive because your environment is like now. I just never had to learn.

[00:11:53] Main reason we wanted to have you on the show, Kendra, is also because, you know, you're awesome and we wanted to have you on the show since, you know, we launched. Honestly, Drilled shirtless for a long time. Yeah. But now it's just the perfect time to have you on because there's just been so much going on with the media. I call it the great media meltdown of 20/20 where like it's like the metoo movement. But for race and we're going to talk for the sake of this show specifically about how it's affected the media industry. So just really quickly, in the past month, we've seen public resignations of top editors at The New York Times in the opinion section. The Philadelphia Inquirer. Bonnot Petite, Pittsburgh Gazette. Which one of my favorites, black staff, were told that they couldn't cover the protests because they would be biased. The L.A. Times had this internal uprising because of insensitive coverage of the protests and is hiring practice and that seems to still be going on.

[00:12:52] They also lost a food editor. That's right. The food editor. Yeah, he stepped down for sexual harassment. But apparently it was a toxic workspace thing. And then just now. Well, I think the Refinery29 global president and chief content officer has stepped in. Wow.

[00:13:09] Yeah. Yeah. That was another one that got like. We've got you back. Yeah.

[00:13:16] Twenty. That's the motto of twenty. Twenty is Life comes at you fast. And also, Vogue has been in hot water for its hiring practices and content and everything. So it just really seems like, you know.

[00:13:29] Yeah. It's it's all kind of coming to a head and it seems like it all started. I can't really tell which one came. First was the New York Times op ed from Senator Tom Cotton or the Philadelphia Inquirer as op ed about buildings matter and things like they were both at the same time. And both of them kind of sparked this public show of protest from the black staff and people of color working there, said The New York Times. People took to Twitter to say, this op ed is running this piece. It puts black New York Times staff in danger. I think that was like the running tweet.

[00:14:07] And then at the Philadelphia Inquirer, black staff and staff of color did a mass sick out.

[00:14:14] The the tech team at the Times also did a virtual walkout. They didn't work for a day, right?

[00:14:22] Yeah. Maybe it will be useful to, like, just recap what was in the Tom Cotton op ed and just like some of the optics around it. I'm going to put Amy on the spot because you wrote about that from the newsletter. Knows all about it. Yeah. I mean, so Tom Cotton, who drinks. No.

[00:14:36] Who eats birthday cake regularly and drinks milk and makes chocolate milk in his mouth with Milliyet in a Hershey Square.

[00:14:44] He was tweeting about this and then turned it into an op ed that he thought that the president should send in military forces to crush the protests.

[00:14:57] And he I mean, the op ed included a bunch of inaccuracies, too. So there were a lot of things around. Yeah. What the protesters were doing and the logistics of sending military in the first place and, you know, all of that, like it was just honestly just read like a ranty right wing Twitter thread that I would just ignore. But here it is in The New York Times opinion section. And I think the headline was Mr. President. But they asked for it. Yeah, they turned out. We found out later that, in fact, that had been commissioned, not pitch. So that was I was like, oh, my God. Right. I think it was Dorene. Say Felix to right about like, oh, my God. I bet this was like, you know, hey.

[00:15:46] Interesting tweet. Do you want to turn it into an op ed? And then it started to put a sleep.

[00:15:53] Oh, I don't think I've ever seen anything like that where the staff of a paper and particularly the and it wasn't just the black staff. But it seems like it was led by the black staff publicly.

[00:16:05] You know, so I don't fuck with this, Ron.

[00:16:09] It's actually. So I think there's a great thing to point out, which is the Times has two sides. One is the newsroom side of it, which is the opinion side.

[00:16:18] And opinion has more latitude in what they're allowed to tweet. The newsroom side is regulated by social media guidelines that you can Google There, public. And one of them is you're not allowed to disparage the institution, essentially. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

[00:16:33] So do you think that's probably true at other papers, too? Or is that really unique to New York Times?

[00:16:40] I think it's true it's true of other papers, too. Yeah. Other papers, too. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I think it's worth noting. I guess it's two, three things. One is that there are those guidelines, but they're not equally applied. So like some people can get away with tweeting things more than other people can get away with. And generally the line is what makes someone uncomfortable. So obviously, their biases within that, right, because they're there, class and their race implications of who gets to be the arbiter of what is acceptable content. Right. And then the third thing is that, like, not everyone. So the time to the union. But not everyone who tweeted that tweet was in the union.

[00:17:26] Yes, which means there was even more remarkable. Right. Yes, they took a greater risk.

[00:17:30] They were taking a bigger risk. And also, we think, though, there's a reason why the claim that they made was that it it it affected the safety of, um, staff members because employers are required to legally provide a safe working environment. Mm hmm. So. Punishing people for that statement. Edges like teeters on the edge of, I believe, of employment loss, because you are you are allowed to speak publicly about work conditions. Right. And you can't stop employees from, like, discussing her conditions for obvious reasons. I should say I have was not you know, I was out. I'm not employed by The New York Times. I was out the door. So this is not coming from I had no I'm not privy to any of those conversations. I knew what you know, based on Twitter.

[00:18:24] Yes, I am. That's like speculation like this is happening.

[00:18:29] Yeah, but the union also came out against the op ed, I believe, just the next day. Yeah.

[00:18:36] So it was a pretty remarkable rebuke from within the organization and with outside of it, too, because this is definitely not the first time the New York Times opinion section has piss people off. Right. This is not the first time there's been like a public uproar. Bret Stephens exists. So this felt really different. And I wonder if it's like also because of like the larger protests, which just seemed to have a whole different hold on the country.

[00:19:03] I was out to Code Switch recently and they were Taeyang. They interviewed a sociologist, I want to say, who had said back in March, essentially that we were going to have a bunch of social movements right now.

[00:19:14] She didn't think it was she she like didn't predict this at all.

[00:19:20] I want to be really clear, but essentially one of the things that they said on the podcast about why they think this time it's different is because one of the things kind of create social unrest is distrust in the government. And I think if you're a black American, you've kind of had an undercurrent of distrust in the government for a while. But if you're a white American, I don't know if that's been as true in such a visceral way. And I think if you're an aware person and you're looking at how the federal government or maybe even how your state has been handling covered and looking at across the border in Canada or looking at New Zealand, New Zealand, Taiwan, Korea, South Korea.

[00:20:01] Yeah, Japan, I could keep going. Yeah. You are asking questions like, why are we not more like them? Mm hmm, yeah. So Coagulating has has kind of sued Mission Trust in a way that I don't think existed before. For larger swaths of people in the United States.

[00:20:24] Then George Floyd happening kind of.

[00:20:27] Fomented again, this undercurrent of mistrust in police officers who are essentially actors of the state.

[00:20:35] And then seeing the brutality on display by police officers, who are you are you know, in your ironically, the protests are happening because of police brutality and they're just like blatantly doing inequality. I know. Yeah. Right. Right. And they were beating up Yandell. I think, actually. Yeah.

[00:20:56] And you're gassing white and journalism people and specifically journalists. And then I think so all of that was happening.

[00:21:02] But then when you're reading a lot of the reporting and I did write about this for Neimann, it was like violence was happening, but it wasn't specific. And I think that the all of that kind of like people who were paying attention and seeing this and yelling this and then that happened and you're telling it, you're essentially putting out an opinion piece asking for an escalation of even more violence against. And brown people in this country is egregious, right? And the fact that it was and I think that's kind of break the logjam in media and that's like when people are like, I'm getting paid this much, this person is toxic. There have been whisperer networks for aboriginals of color, have whisperer networks forever. I can probably give you a list. You know, five pages long of people that I will never work for because based on the whisper network. But like that. Yeah. Healthy, right. Because you have to be in journalism for a certain amount of time to get access to the secret net roots, which means that you have to undergo a certain degree of grace. Mm hmm.

[00:22:03] Right. For someone who doesn't know what a whisper network is.

[00:22:06] How would you explain it? Because I understand. But I would be interested in your words.

[00:22:11] Yeah. So a whisper network intentionally is communities of people. So there, there, ones for journals of color, I think. And then there are also one for women journalists. Which essentially tells you which institutions or people you know, by map, word of mouth, essentially, you should not work for warlike ways of navigating around there, structures.

[00:22:34] Right, I think. Yeah. It's also like it exists in different industries, too, so it exists and like the nonprofit world, like which organization that's a work for. And I think people often think of whisper networks as working among those with power, like, you get blackballed in any given industry. But like. And then. But they don't think about how marginalized people also who use whisper networks. And so they're always like, well, we put the job out and then people of color didn't apply or women didn't apply and they didn't. They are not realizing that, like, oh, actually, they talk about you, too.

[00:23:10] Your reputation matters, too. I did. Yeah.

[00:23:14] Tweet that I said something. I can't remember the exact reading, but I was like, if you have a job application out, like no people of color applying your age, probably because it reports to a toxic person in real life.

[00:23:25] I just thought of another reason why I think this time was different in the media, because so many media outlets sort of posted these things like we're in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

[00:23:36] Like Refinery29 and all these other places don't like the blackout Tuesday. And because this movement is different, the response to them just being like we're listening and learning was way more of like you've been listening and learning for a long fucking time. Like you should know what to do now. Like, if you're still learning, you failed the class. Like, sorry.

[00:23:56] So it's a number of journalists who were showing receipts, like the people who are coming forward with details, who sort of like it's not my silence is not worth this industry, essentially. Right, exactly.

[00:24:08] A lot of people feeling like they have so little to lose this time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:24:13] You talk a little bit, Kendra, about the journalism awards problem, too, and how race plays into who gets kind of put forward for what.

[00:24:23] So it's very different, obviously, if you're freelance. Oftentimes, if you're freelance, you have to submit yourself. Generally, his news organizations want to promote their staff. For these reasons, I like paying your salary. We want to get you up. That said, to the we most submission, most awards, the way they work in journalism is you have to pay to submit. So that's just like an obvious thing. And so most institutions make decisions about whose work will get submitted there,. Oftentimes there are kind of two ways in which that sort of prioritizes white men. First, if your sort of like where people get placed in the newsroom and what beats them around to cover. Mm hmm. And very often, you know, like political reporting is skewed very white now. And that's considered a procedure placement. So so they're just like that fundamental aspect of like who gets to be nut jobs and then who gets the time to do sort of these bigger, deeper projects that are sort of held off as prestige. And often, again, there's a bias towards giving white men that role. And you'll often hear in newsrooms like someone will come up and an idea and they'll be like, oh, you're not. They won't say it this explicitly, but they're like. This other white man is a perfect person for this kind of a piece that you just raise and you're like, man, I just raised it like, why? And that happens all the time. Karen Tía. I'm not sure that you know the same. She's an opinion writer at The Washington Post. And it just came out that this path Pulitzer's use and she's got a phenomenal opinion writer. It's really beautiful while research things. And they didn't include her in a Pulitzer admissions year. They didn't select her work. And so, yeah, you can submit on your own it is an option in many cases, but then you're taking the cost on your own. So that's an extra literal financial cost. And then you have to think through how to package your work together. And all of that assumes, of course, that you have had the time and space to do the kind of work that wins awards. Right. And the reason awards matter, just like broadly, is because there's a cachet, especially with some of the bigger ones. And it can open doors. It can get you better pay. You can do all sorts of things. But oftentimes the people who sort of reap the most benefit from those awards, again, are right now.

[00:26:51] You've written a bit about this, I think, in Kate Aronoff has written about this. But like, the thing that really annoys me is that the infiltration of people whose only apparent qualification is that they're white men. So I'm talking about like, is it Johnson's effort?

[00:27:07] Are you. I'm Jonathan. Just like arriving and being there. They're end up being me. Yeah.

[00:27:13] And them being upheld is like a valid ring in which. For what? For no reason that I can discern, like there doesn't seem to be any like. Actual understanding of the broader issues or actual wrestling with the complexities contexts. But one of the things that I do think has changed is that like now there is more political climate reporting, like climate running as a form of political reporting. And I think that that. I have complicated feelings about that. Lots of kids have complicated feelings about the way we're political or putting happens in this country broadly, which is a lot of inside baseball and a lot of like watching the game and not enough of like these are people's lives and these policies have consequences. And I need to understand the implications of this policy. And this and political reporting often doesn't provide that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:28:13] Another thing we wanted to talk about is how like this isn't just white men like white women are a big part of this problem.

[00:28:22] So another part of this fallout has been, like we were saying at Refinery29, it's finished show. Vogue has been in the crosshairs. The wing, which is not really an outlet. There's definitely a media darling and like a connection hot spot for people. And media has been in hot water. And there's probably a bunch of others that are missing. And there is this really good piece that came out recently called The End of the Girl. Boss is here and I can't resist the urge to read a quick excerpt from it.

[00:28:55] The gap between everything that successful men took for granted and everything that ambitious women won, it became outrageous, tender for the girl bosses fire. Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential run was the match that lit the flame. It was the total. It was a total girl boss move to run again. After losing the primary to Obama in 2008, the white girl boss and so many of them were, white said at the unique intersection of oppression and privilege. She saw gender, gender inequity everywhere she looked. This gave her something to wage war against racial inequity. It was never really on her radar.

[00:29:33] I actually am really thrilled to see white women be called to the mat on this stuff because I do feel like a lot of them hiding behind patriarchy. And this is beyond justice, you know, in the media. I think that light is always like dismantle the patriarchy. But like, the closer you get is like, are you really trying to dismantle the page for sure? Or you're just trying to remake it in your own image.

[00:29:54] And like, I need to know what the end goal is so I can decide if I belong here or not. So, yeah, I don't know.

Transcription

The media is having a Me Too moment for journalists of color amid national protests against policy brutality and systemic, all against a backdrop of a climate emergency. NYT climate reporter-turned Gimlet podcaster Kendra Pierre-Louis joins us to talk about all of this and more. Plus: dad jokes, mayo edition!

S2, Ep2 | Mary and Amy Watched “The Politician”

S2, Ep1 | Media in Meltdown and Climate in Crisis, with Kendra Pierre-Louis

Hot Take is a holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it. Hosted by real-life friends Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt—an essayist and a journalist— Hot Take offers a unique perspective on the issue of climate change. With a breath of fresh humanity and humor, conversation moves swiftly from cackling about the bad week an oil company had, to speaking seriously and passionately about the unequal distribution of climate impacts and our own experiences of climate grief. And then washing it down with a round of dad jokes! Every week, we’ll connect you with the latest climate news and with the journalists and storytellers trying to make sense of this complex issue to help you see the world through climate-colored glasses. We ended production on Hot Take at the end of 2022, but you can still access episodes here, or 

A holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it.

S2, Ep1 | Media in Meltdown and Climate in Crisis, with Kendra Pierre-Louis

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S2, Ep2 | Mary and Amy Watched “The Politician”