As midterms approach, climate activists have noticed elected officials displaying a pattern of “climate hushing” — dropping discussions of climate change from their platform. In parallel, 2026 has seen a fleecing of climate desks, with major outlets like NPR and Washington Post saying they’re folding climate and environment reporting into general assignment work.

For our Since 2020 series, environment reporter Adam Mahoney covered how this pattern makes it easier for politicians to evade accountability around climate and raises questions about efforts to diversify climate reporting — ultimately hurting those most affected by climate change.

Read on for more, and find an abbreviated version of our media round-up on Instagram each week. (Here’s our most recent example.)

ICYMI: Last week, we published an early analysis about U.S. freelance journalists’ average rate by National Writers Union-Freelance Solidarity Project members. You can read that commentary here.

—James Salanga

When Adam Mahoney became the environmental justice reporter for Grist, he wrote, “I thrived, and, in a sense, so did climate and environmental reporting.”

Mahoney broke stories about the federal government, saw his work cited by the White House and in litigation, and watched environmental justice move from the margins toward the center of climate coverage. For the first time, many national outlets consistently paired reporting on climate with context on systemic inequality and policy failure.

But a few years later, much of that infrastructure has been dismantled, hurting the communities most affected by climate change — those with whom Mahoney covers, report in and with, and spends his days — and pushing out reporters with the time and expertise to follow how sea‑level rise, heat, and pollution are colliding with housing, health care, and already‑fragile local democracies.

Professors studying climate journalism argue that climate cannot realistically be an add-on to general assignment reporting. And those newsroom promises mean little for people in rural areas where tech companies are building energy‑hungry data centers and industrial infrastructure, driving up local electricity demand without a corresponding investment in efficiency or bill assistance.

Read the full story.

🇵🇸 Mahmoud Shalha wrote a reflection for Writers Against the War on Gaza on the mixed support journalists have seen while on the ground. Some journalists are recognized for their commitment to truth even as Gaza remains the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist. Shalha was fired from Al-Jazeera along with more than twenty colleagues, though the company has not explained why. 

👋 Eli Zeger wrote about the rise of the friendly neighborhood media cooperative as layoffs mount for the more corporate publishers. But that doesn’t mean they don’t also have to worry about the latest traffic-tanking algorithm and subscription metrics. 

📺 The headline insinuating Abdul El-Sayed had controversial 9/11 tweets was personally pushed by Bari Weiss, “Editor in Chief” of CBS News. This is according to a source who spoke to Oliver Darcy, head of media newsletter Status. Weiss has already faced accusations of conservative bias after the loss of workers at 60 Minutes critical of the Trump administration.

🔎 The Organization for Accessible Journalism is currently conducting a survey to better understand how the news industry sees accessibility and how accessible news sites are. 

💰 Efforts from the Block family (former owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) to block court orders to pay back wages to union workers who took part in a historic strike have failed and been turned the Supreme Court and must pay.

Have a story you think we should include in this section of next week’s newsletter? Let us know here or by responding to this email.

This issue is by Marlee Baldridge and James Salanga. Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.

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