Do As We Say, Not As We Publish
The Guardian launders the industry grades on climate coverage using an advocacy group's unlinked and unverifiable numbers and to a standard it fails half the time itself
“What more can we say about British propaganda, which we have routinely characterized as often being wholly out of sync with reality?” wrote Doomberg about a British media’s coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war, but it could just as easily serve as the epigraph for Fiona Harvey’s July 14 piece on UK heatwave coverage published in The Guardian entitled Most UK media reports on June heatwave failed to mention climate crisis.
The premise is simple enough. The claim is that most UK newspaper coverage of June’s UK heatwave failed to mention the term climate crisis. That “analysis,” which careful readers have to go hunting to discover because Harvey fails to link to it in her “article,” comes from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), a climate-and-net-zero advocacy organization. ECIU publishes deliverables they call “analysis,” but strangely this one is nowhere to be found on their website.
Despite being the producers of the alleged “analysis” mentioned by Harvey, the only item discussing the topic on their website is a press release entitled, “Three in 4 UK newspaper articles on record-breaking heatwave didn’t mention climate.”
The opacity doesn’t begin with The Guardian. ECIU’s own press release, which is supposedly the underlying “analysis” that Harvey failed to link to, reveals little about their methodology.
This part of their press release is about the closest thing we get to understanding what they did:
The analysis examined media articles in top UK national newspapers from Monday 22 June to Sunday 28 June. It tracked how many articles including the phrase “extreme heat” or “heatwave” also referred to “climate change” or a similar term such as “climate” or “global warming”. It also tracked how many of those same articles also referred to the specific phrase “net zero”.
Harvey, in her Guardian piece says virtually the same thing, with only two minor tweaks:
The analysis examined media articles in top UK national media publications from Monday 22 June to Sunday 28 June. It tracked how many articles including the phrase “extreme heat” or “heatwave” also referred to “climate change” or a similar term such as “climate” or “global warming”. It also tracked how many of those same articles also referred to the phrase “net zero”.
In other words, Harvey (and her editors at The Guardian) presented an unattributed quote masquerading as their own “journalistic” prose.
ECIU did this, allegedly, by searching for these specific keywords through Factiva, a proprietary service licensed largely in volume to institutions and corporations at a price point. That puts a Factiva subscription well beyond the reach of independent researchers, small outlets, or ordinary readers who might want to check the work. The public, in other words, is asked to trust numbers they have no way to audit, sourced from a group with an known activism-driven policy agenda, and reported by an outlet with excessive bias who couldn't be bothered to link to it.
Given that “climate crisis” is such a common term used by the climate change hysterics, especially at The Guardian, it’s mind-boggling that the term isn’t explicitly mentioned as one of the search terms. This is after all, the publication who has an entire Climate Crises section under their news section which operates as a catch all section for anything from news to reviews and opinion related to the environment.
So, which UK newspapers fall on the naughty list? Well, it depends on which source gets read. ECIU's public press release discloses only two hard percentages - The Sun at 6% and The Financial Times at 64%. It contains no breakdown for The Guardian's own 49% or 64-of-131 figure as reported by Harvey and includes no story counts or percentages for:
The Independent (in Harvey’s words: “783 heatwave stories over the period, of which 304 – roughly 39% – mentioned the climate”)
The Mail (in Harvey’s words: “about a fifth” of “more than 300 heatwave stories” )
The Express (in Harvey’s words: “about one in eight of the 400-plus stories” )
The Mirror (in Harvey’s words: “more than 300 – but only 9% of them mentioned the climate”)
Recall both ECIU’s press release and Harvey’s virtually plagiarized telling of it said they looked for specific terms such as “extreme heat,” “heatwave,” “climate change,” “climate,” or “global warming?” Or is it simply as Harvey said in some of her article “mentioning the climate?”
All that granular, outlet-by-outlet data is present in Harvey’s Guardian article but absent from ECIU’s press release. Either The Guardian conducted its own supplementary counting exercise, which it never discloses separately from ECIU’s work or ECIU provided The Guardian with a more comprehensive unpublished data and has yet to publish their full work. Either scenario warrants explicit disclosure, not leaving readers to reconstruct the information by comparing two documents side by side. If it’s the latter, it implies that the Guardian wasn’t merely repackaging someone else’s press release. Instead, it possessed primary data that was inaccessible to the public, presented it as exclusive “journalism,“ and implicitly graded every other outlet it covered, while simultaneously writing a piece about the industry’s collective failure to be transparent with readers.
Then there’s the sleight of hand in the headline itself. The Guardian’s house style has, since 2019, insisted on “climate crisis” over “climate change,” and other “outdated” terms such as “global warming.” The sub-headline insists “almost three-quarters made no reference to global heating.” yet the term “global heating” does not appear to be part of the search criteria.
So why are they only getting roughly a coin flip’s probability of covering these events in the way they’re demanding? As a glutton of punishment (a daily reader of whatever The Guardian publishes in their Climate Crisis section) this utterly low rate came as a surprise.
We don’t really get that answer, but instead get a wall of orgiastic self-congratulation.
At the end of this article, they explain:
A Guardian spokesperson said: “The Guardian leads the way in reporting on the link between extreme weather events and the climate crisis, with our coverage presenting global heating as an urgent, factual reality.
“Clear, accurate journalism is essential to helping the public understand the climate crisis and the solutions required. Already in 2026, the Guardian has published hundreds of articles mentioning the ‘climate crisis’ or ‘climate emergency’. In 2019, we helped reframe newsroom priorities across the industry by updating our style guide to adopt terms like ‘climate emergency’ and ‘global heating’. Our editorial commitment also drives our choices as a business: we were the first major global news organisation to ban fossil-fuel advertising, divest from fossil fuels, and achieve B Corp certification as we work toward our goal of net-zero emissions.”
In that 2019 article by none other than by Damian Carrington opens with:
The Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world.
Instead of “climate change” the preferred terms are “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” and “global heating” is favoured over “global warming”, although the original terms are not banned.
Editor-in-chief Katharine Viner explained their reasoning at the time:
“We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue,” said the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. “The phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”
As Orwell wrote in his proposed preface to Animal Farm, “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.”
In other words, The Guardian’s “style guide” doesn’t need to ban these allegedly imprecise terms. Instead, house style, editorial reinforcement, hiring only insufferable elitist activists masquerading as journalists, and seven years of incessant screaming about the term “climate” coupled with “crises,” “breakdowns,” and “emergencies” achieve the same suppression informally. This allows the paper to claim that the term was never banned while simultaneously eliminating it from its preferred vocabulary. Except they just ratted themselves out as not being consistent with their own demands.
None of this requires “denying” that climate change makes heatwaves worse (it is only one factor but The Guardian will never say that), or that media coverage often does a poor job explaining causation. Those are separate, empirically answerable questions from the one at hand. The point is narrower and, in some ways, more damning in that an outlet that positions itself as the public’s guide through a genuine scientific and policy challenge chose propaganda’s tools over journalism’s buy using an unlinked source, a borrowed numbers nobody can verify, a substituted definitions that flatters its own brand, and a tone of moral authority it doesn’t extend to its own numbers.