How to Really Reach

How do we reach people who don’t care? The need to combat apathy and hopelessness is more urgent than ever for our climate, but meaningful conversation has become difficult to create. News used to become stories which, shared properly, changed minds and improved our world for all through meaningful action. We lost that flow of news to conversation to action when the communication landscape changed, but by examining that new reality, we can relearn.

Here’s a recent event to break down:

A tennis match of the Washington Open was interrupted on August 4th by climate protesters. They threw some balls painted with flames onto the court and unfurled a banner demanding the event’s sponsors, Citi and Mubadala, cease investment in oil extraction. Court cleared, protesters escorted out, the game resumed. One of the players, Taylor Fritz, commented on the protesters, saying he thought they had “a good cause,” but called them “annoying” and derided them for “ruining everyone else’s good time.”

Climate Defiance protesters at the Washington Open. Photo from the New York Post

Hearing this, some may be tempted to hop on social media to give Taylor Fritz a hard time. Don’t do that. Yes, he may have suffered minor inconvenience compared to the millions suffering real harm in the ongoing heat waves, but let us be kind. If kindness is not reason enough, remember this: harassing people on social media is a terrible activity that never changes anyone’s mind, and kills the mood for both the person receiving and the person typing the angry message. It puts people further on the defensive, so they retreat into their current opinions. Hostile memes and abuse achieve nothing.

Instead, let us look at how the story was covered:

The Guardian, which protest-group Climate Defiance celebrated getting mentioned by, focused their report on the tennis matches. In 14 paragraphs of reporting, the actions of the protesters are given one sentence. From the Guardian:

“Fritz’s epic encounter with Murray was held up while a group of protesters who had thrown giant tennis balls on to the court were escorted from the stand.”

The following sentence is about Murray smashing his tennis racket over a bad serve. Two paragraphs are later given to Fritz’s complaints about the protesters, then the Guardian moves on to Dan Evans’s matches and Coco Gauff’s victory. More words and detail are given to the play-by-play of the matches than a climate protest that stopped the game in its tracks. The Guardian’s report is not about a climate protest interrupting a tennis match. It is instead the story of a tennis tournament doing business as usual.

Fortunately, we have another report on the same event that shows how much can be accomplished within an established reporting framework.

Reporter Shrivathsa Sridhar and editor William Mallard tighten the story’s focus. Where the Guardian rolled the tournament and protest into a single report, Sridhar & Mallard reported for Reuters only on Fritz’s complaints about the protest (other Reuters journalists prepared a separate story covering the tournament’s outcome). Unlike the Guardian, Reuters’s report doesn’t bury the protest under scores and rivalries. Sridhar & Mallard don’t name the protesters or the protesting organization, but they give the actions of the protesters at this and previous sporting events equal weight to Fritz’s gripes with switching between the two and offering both similar space on the page. The master stroke comes at the end:

"'I think they're supporting a good cause, but the way they're doing it... Who's going to want to listen when they're just annoying everybody?'

Fritz returned in the evening to seal a 6-3 6-3 victory over Jordan Thompson to storm into the semi-finals, where he takes on Tallon Griekspoor."

By ending the report this way, Sridhar & Mallard let Fritz’s question of ‘who will want to listen’ hanging in the air for a moment, then answer it by cutting to the unrelated result of the tournament. The implication is clear: who wants to listen to climate? Not professional tennis or its sponsors.

A climate protester at the Laver Cup in September 2022, being carried off after setting fire to his own arm (hidden by black bag in photo). Photo from the AP Photo / Kin Cheung

These two reports differ wildly in their storytelling despite the fact that their connection is more than skin deep: the Guardian report cites the Reuters report as a source.

Screenshot of the Guardian acknowledging Reuters as a source, taken August 7, 2023

A great deal of reporting is done “downstream” of Reuters, wherein the anchor on the evening news is talking over Reuters’s footage while reading a script partly based on information Reuters provided—Reuters knows that any bias they allow in their reporting will pollute reporting done by their customers and harm the reputation of both. This has helped create Reuters’s minimalist reporting style: cutting away all interpretation for a laser-focus on the facts with just enough context.

Though Sridhar & Mallard had fewer words to work with and a more rigid reporting style to adhere to, they report they wrote for Reuters says far more. It allows the reader to see Taylor Fritz as a case of “privileged distress” getting upset over a minor inconvenience to him while the protesters are trying to save lives and homes. But by quoting only Fritz and leaving the protesters unnamed, the Reuters report also allows the reader to understand the position Fritz was in: confused on the court while people so high up in the stands he probably couldn’t make them out well yelled and threw things and upset the people who came to see him.

So, how do we reach people who, like Taylor Fritz, don’t care (yet)?

A little understanding goes a long way.

First, a few facts. According to Wikipedia, Taylor Fritz is 25 years old. In other words, still rather young, and he has probably spent a lot of his time growing up practicing tennis to be able to perform at the level he does. A person in that position might not spend as much time festering over the news as others his age do—he has to go practice for hours each day.

Then, we look at the words he said. Fritz expressed a desire for “a better way” to get climate action done and a concern over “ruining everybody else’s good time.” These tell us he cares about the comfort of others. He considers it “a good cause”, so we are already part way there.

Finally, put it together into a story. Might be a little something like this:

Taylor Fritz (or anyone else annoyed by climate protests), I get you. We would all love for this climate crisis to be solved quickly and quietly. That “better way” of climate action? People have been doing just that. We, the climate concerned, have been writing to our elected representatives, researching climate impacts of carbon emissions, and warning government officials about sea level rise, quietly and out of your way. We have been doing that for fifty years and has not worked.

June 24, 1988 issue of the New York Times. Top story: a hearing before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources of the United States Senate on Carbon Dioxide and climate consequences. Image from the New York Times.

The inconvenience an athlete and their fans endure when climate protesters is a downer. Yeah, it kills the mood. Everyone deserves relief of some kind from whatever is on their plate—whether its a stressful job, upcoming school exam, family, anything—and these protests get in the way of that. For that, I at least, want to apologize.

But right now we don’t see much other choice. The climate is right now at a precarious point where the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the next few years will determine whether global temperatures climb a manageable amount, or soar to make many cities unlivable. Citi, one of the sponsors of that tennis match, is actively funding the expansion of oil and gas extraction. They have to stop. We have to convince them to stop, not in 2050, not in 2030, now.

If Citi and others don’t stop, some of your fans will have to abandon their homes as the ocean rises. If they don’t stop, you and your fellow players will face increasing risk of heat stroke every time you go out to practice.

Is that not worth a little of your time now?

Whether it is or isn’t, you, Taylor Fritz, have a voice to use as you see fit. Citi and the other polluters who are damning the world for a quick dollar may not have listened to the protesters, or to the scientists, but they might listen to a star of the sport they sponsor.

If you truly think this is a good cause—good enough to be worth talking to your fellow players and the tournament sponsors about—then we can ensure everyone’s good time.

And if you were to speak up, you would not be alone.

Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest reduced in speed by 66% this last July, and as I write this all the countries which have part of the Amazon within their borders are meeting in Belem to hammer out the first common policy to protect and replant the world’s largest rainforest.

The steel industry is racing towards zero emissions, with mining companies investing in new technology to extract iron from ore at a fraction of the carbon cost and smelters switching to hydrogen-reduction smelting facilities in Sweden.

We are on the right track, but still have too many powerful institutions clinging to the easy money of fossil fuels. Citi is one of them, but not the only. If someone brings them around, the near future will be better for us all. We have to shake our institutions and companies awake—usually requires brief discomfort—to protect everyone’s good times.