WASHINGTON, June 25, 2026 — I’ll cop to a handful of old man-ish habits. One of those is that I still watch the evening news. I record it every night, and watch at least the A-block (the extended first segment before the first commercial airs). While we’re living in an increasingly fragmented media landscape and the reach of the big three networks is a fraction of what it once was, I still watch because it’s as good an indicator I’ve found of what is actually reaching regular folks at home. My broadcast of choice is NBC Nightly News.
On Tuesday night the broadcast opened with, “Tonight, the dangerous triple weather threat, with fires, floods, and deadly heat affecting millions.” The 62 million Americans in the path of dangerous storms from Mississippi to Boston also led the broadcast on Monday evening. The reporter in the lead story was wearing a hat that read “NBC News Climate Unit.” This was noteworthy to me because I haven’t seen climate mentioned at all in NBC’s coverage for months and months.
There’s something we all lose when climate is totally absent from any reporting: context. Without connecting the dots for why this dangerous weather is happening, and the costs we are all being forced to bear, news coverage retreats into something akin to the old adage for local news that, “if it bleeds, it leads.”
We still see the human toll and heartbreak of climate-fueled disasters, but the connection to what’s causing them is increasingly missing from the coverage. This is particularly unfortunate because NBC News had been a real leader in connecting unnatural disasters to climate change. I remember fondly my friend and former colleague, Andrew Mayock, interviewing Al Roker as part of a Federal Sustainability Speaker Series in September of 2022. Roker spoke passionately about NBC’s deliberate, years-long effort to make climate change a core part of its reporting on extreme weather. When asked about “both-sides-ism” in climate coverage, Roker responded that NBC didn’t approach it that way because the science was settled. Stepping away from discussing climate change because it has become politically polarizing isn’t much better than giving equal weight to climate denial. In both cases, audiences are left without the context they need to understand what’s happening around them.
Failing to address the root causes of these disasters is troubling enough. Even worse is the Trump administration’s effort to eliminate the very systems that allow us to measure and understand them. The administration was forced to back down this week after bipartisan backlash over its proposal to dismantle the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), a sophisticated global ocean monitoring network. Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley captured the stakes well: “Dismantling the OOI was supreme stupidity, and we’ll keep fighting to ensure scientists, fishermen, and coastal communities can continue to utilize the critical data the OOI provides.”
I’m proud to be fighting on the side of science, and with your help and support, we will continue to push back against efforts to bury our heads in the sand or ignore the consequences of our actions.