Yeah, Sounds Legit: News Corp Oz Reportedly Set To Go All Green And Stop Cranking Out Climate Lies
Uh-huh.
News Corp Australia, seen by many as the nation’s most enduring purveyor of climate science denial and a faithful backer of fossil fuels, is about to turn over a fresh green leaf. At least that’s according to unconfirmed reports from Nine newspapers and the New York Times that say the Murdoch-owned outlets will launch a campaign next month backing a global net zero greenhouse gas emissions target by 2050.
In an editorial this week, the Sydney Morning Herald declared News Corp had decided to “to end its longstanding editorial hostility towards carbon-reduction policies.” But while News Corp itself has not confirmed the campaign, that has not stopped widespread speculation over the impact – or otherwise – of a pro-climate campaign from one of the country’s most divisive voices. “I’m not going to give them credit for something they haven’t done yet,” said former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, speaking to the New York Times. Turnbull told one senior News Corp figure last year the company’s “campaign on climate denial” had done “enormous damage to the world” and had left a “shocking legacy” of inaction.
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In the New York Times, one anonymous source from a News Corp paper said political and business figures had been given advanced notice of a campaign. A Vanity Fair article has asked whether the “climate rebrand” from Murdoch’s Australian outlets could reach Fox News and the Wall Street Journal (the former is partly owned by the Murdochs, and the latter is owned by News Corp).
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Have we been here before? Yes. In 2006, after years of climate change scepticism Rupert Murdoch said the planet “deserves the benefit of the doubt” signalling an apparent shift. A year later, his company launched a corporate environmental sustainability campaign called 1 Degree. Yet Murdoch’s views soon reverted back to scepticism. The denialism expressed through his media outlets barely missed a beat. In November 2019, Murdoch declared there were “no climate deniers” around his company. The day after Murdoch made his declaration, the Australian published a column from mining figure and geologist Ian Plimer claiming “it has never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/08/is-rupert-murdochs-news-corp-australia-really-shifting-away-from-climate-denialism