Can we, and should we, ever really be neutral? In a new series, Zócalo explores the idea of neutrality—in politics, sports, gender, journalism, and more. In this essay, journalism scholar Perry Parks makes the case for favoring evidence over equivalence when it comes to climate change.

Last year was the hottest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere. Earth’s ocean surfaces were warmer in the first month of 2024 than any previously recorded January. And by the end of this year, global climate-related deaths since 2000 could exceed 4 million people, according to one estimate.

The immediacy and the stakes of human-driven climate change have never been clearer. Yet journalists reporting on climate-driven disasters are still pulling punches in their coverage. They often don’t explicitly invoke climate change in their reporting, and even more rarely do they identify the primary culprit behind it: the human consumption of fossil fuels, egged on by oil and gas companies that have long known better.

Journalists cherish their performance of neutrality when reporting on controversial issues. But this commitment to appearing “balanced”—even when one side is relying on evidence and the other is making things up—has come at a profound cost. It’s led major news outlets to cover what should be the science story of our time through the lens of politics, resulting in a delayed, diminutive planetary response to the once slowly, and now rapidly, accelerating climate emergency.

Journalistic neutrality posits that it’s possible to approach a news story without filtering choices through some system of values: about what’s right and wrong, true and false, important and trivial, “normal” and deviant. But this long-held reporting norm is a fallacy. Contemporary media critics such as Jay Rosen and Lewis Raven Wallace have aptly argued that all communication originates in “a view from somewhere”: We are inevitably influenced by our experiences, our families, our peers, and our moral commitments, and it’s more productive to recognize and acknowledge these commitments than to delude ourselves or (as journalists often do) over-represent views we find harmful just to demonstrate impartiality.

Right-wing actors have weaponized the fear of being labeled “biased” to manipulate reporting by insisting on “both sides” treatment that offers equally credulous depictions of crystal-clear science and cynical “skeptics.” Reporters who are believed to have crossed a line into opinion or “advocacy” can lose prestige, or even their jobs, by not adequately acquiescing to an elusive and idealized standard of neutrality. This has led journalists to violate their own sense of morality or legitimize movements of which they are rightfully skeptical in their coverage. Veteran environmental journalist Amy Westervelt has spoken about this on her groundbreaking “Drilled” podcast: “I myself have had editors remove mentions of climate science from a story about worsening wildfires because they don’t want to ‘make the story political.’”

A late-20th century campaign exploiting this neutrality norm through well-promoted pseudo-science and supporting rhetoric from fossil fuel-friendly politicians prompted journalists to waste years tepidly “balancing” empirical truths about rising climate risks against bad-faith claims that climate change was a “hoax” or conspiracy. Max Boykoff, a leading scholar in exposing these patterns, found in one study of climate coverage from 1995 to 2004 that journalists’ failures to clearly portray the scientific consensus “have led to the appearance of amplified uncertainty and debate, also then permeating public and policy discourse.”

Journalists now face an ethical choice that affects the fate of life on Earth: Do they stick with the vaunted value of “neutrality” and keep balancing good-faith climate communication with bad-faith, debunked denialism? Or do they cover the climate emergency as an increasingly urgent fact and mitigate the muddle that has plagued our public discourse?

Inspiration for an alternative path can be found in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. This widely influential code, revised in 2014 by the century-old organization representing journalists in the U.S., offers four main principles: Seek Truth and Report It, Act Independently, Be Accountable and Transparent, and Minimize Harm.

In the context of climate change, the directive to minimize harm is the most overlooked. This tenet has guided journalists through many discrete cases where the safety, well-being, and privacy of individual news sources are at stake. Protecting a sexual assault victim’s identity, for instance, might mean being less transparent and delivering less truth than would naming that victim. In such cases, journalists generally err on the side of minimizing harm.

Yet because the mandate to minimize harm is narrowly interpreted to focus on individual sources and subjects, its highest potential is largely untapped. Journalists’ much broader obligation to minimize harm—by considering the safety and well-being of communities, societies, and the very planet that sustains life and journalistic work – has been almost entirely neglected.

Climate change is perhaps the most compelling case for applying a broader interpretation of the principle to minimize harm: favoring evidence over equivalence and making coverage choices that starkly clarify the stakes of continued inaction.

Scientists have recently warned that averting global catastrophe will require a radical restructuring of economic and social life on Earth — an astonishing statement that calls into question nearly every element of our daily lives. But while this warning was duly reported, it has barely interrupted the largely episodic nature of climate coverage in mainstream media, which continues to look from day to day as though we weren’t on the precipice of irrevocable disaster.

The historian Howard Zinn famously said, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” As the train of humanity barrels toward a potentially unlivable world, anyone who’s not trying to slow it down might as well be driving it.

There’s only one way for journalists to minimize harm around climate change—and that’s to fight it.