Thousands of media professionals are at the United Nations climate talks in Brazil. Almost none of them appear to be from the four major US broadcasters.
Nearly 4,000 members of the media registered to attend the global climate conference, known as Cop30, according to a preliminary list released by the United Nations climate body on Tuesday. But none of the “big four” US broadcasters – CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox – appear to currently have teams present at the talks.
According to the list, no representatives from CBS, NBC or Fox signed up to attend the talks. Two US staffers from ABC signed up to attend, and though they are reporting on the summit, it is unclear if they are in Brazil.
The big four television outlets also appear not to be covering the climate negotiations in a significant way. In a review of TV coverage of Cop30 shared exclusively with the Guardian, the non-profit Media Matters found that weekday morning and evening national news shows on ABC, CBS and NBC had not covered Cop30 from 6 November through 11 November. Fox News aired two segments that totalled roughly five minutes of coverage, one of which promoted “anti-climate narratives”, Media Matters said.
The Guardian has contacted all four major broadcasters for comment.
It was “unimaginable” that major western broadcasters would choose to sit out the talks, said Stefano Wrobleski, director of InfoAmazonia, a non-profit independent media outlet focused on the Amazonian region.
“I can’t see how or why an outlet with funds would choose not to come to Brazil for this,” he said. “We are here and we have a much smaller budget than the big outlets in the US.”
This year, the US has failed to send a delegation to the UN climate talks for the first time. Donald Trump, who calls climate action a “scam”, pulled the US from the Paris climate agreement in January.
But the absence of US officials should not be an excuse to ignore the talks, said Wrobleski.
“News is still happening here,” he said. “It’s not as though because Trump isn’t here, because the US didn’t send a delegation, this is not newsworthy.”
Mark Hertsgaard, executive director of the New York-based Covering Climate Now, of which the Guardian is a founding member, said he immediately noticed the lack of US-based TV news reporters at Cop30.
“Most climate journalists I’ve spoken with privately want to be here – it’s their newsroom managers and corporate bosses who’ve decided against it,” he told the Guardian. “The rationale is usually budgets – it costs money to fly journalists to Belém, house them, etc.”
News budgets are shrinking in the US amid slowed advertising growth, but “how newsrooms spend their limited budgets still reflects the editorial priorities of those newsrooms”, said Hertsgaard, who added that the scaling back comes amid visible evidence of the dangers of the climate crisis in recent weeks with the typhoon in the Philippines and Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica.
Logistical issues have made it difficult for some attending Cop30 to find affordable lodging. But there is “no good reason”, Hertsgaard said, that those challenges should have stopped major US outlets from attending.
“It’s difficult and expensive to go to any Cop, and not only Cop, but so many major events,” he said, adding that there was “too much of a narrative” that a city such as Belém was “not the richest”.
If that is the case, publications seem to be deprioritizing climate coverage. That includes large TV networks, several of which have seen major layoffs in recent years. Climate reporting has been harshly affected by outlets’ staffing cuts. Last month, CBS reportedly laid off most of its climate team shortly after the arrival of its controversial new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss. Environmental reporters and editors have also been cut from publications from CNN and the LA Times, to HuffPost and Vice.
Perhaps due in part to workforce reductions, US broadcasters’ climate coverage has been on the decline. Last year, US corporate broadcast networks aired 12 hours and 51 minutes of climate coverage in 2024, according to a separate analysis from Media Matters – a 25% decline in volume of coverage from 2023.
InfoAmazonia did not just send a team to cover Cop30: Wrobleski and his team also organized accommodations for more than a dozen Indigenous and local journalists from around the Amazon region to stay. The group is staying in a house 20 minutes from the Cop venue, where the organizers are hosting briefings with social movements, political leaders and others.
“We’ve managed to come here. We’ve managed to bring much smaller outlets here,” he said.
It would have been well worth the effort for outlets to send teams to the talks, Wrobleski said. “It’s the first Cop in the Amazon, and the whole city is alive with Cop,” he said. “They’re missing a lot.”
