I’m extremely excited to share something I’ve been working on for the last few months: A new weekly video podcast for HEATED.
To make it happen, I’m teaming up with one of television’s most experienced climate journalists. She recently lost her job because a centibillionaire’s son took control of a major news network and decided that climate change reporting was “no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.”
To him I say: Your loss is our gain.
Meet our new producer in episode one, linked at the top of this newsletter and available on all your podcast apps and YouTube. (Subscribe to our channel!)
But Emily, why are you doing this?
Great question. For almost seven years now, HEATED has been a text-only operation—minus that one six-episode podcast mini series we did in 2020 on coronavirus. (Only OGs will remember).
But most people don’t actually get their news by reading it. They get it by consuming it via social media, mostly in video form. And loads of people prefer listening to their news rather than reading it, so they can multitask while driving, cooking, or peddling on the bike. (It’s me. I’m loads of people).
I’ve wanted to bring HEATED into the audio/visual space for a while, I just didn’t have the right person to help me. I needed someone who knows the climate beat inside and out, who understands video production, who gets my personality, and—crucially—who is super Type A. Now I have that person. Thank you, David Ellison.
I’ve also been feeling lots of pressure from the climate news environment crumbling around me. This felt like the right moment to try and expand.
Am I about to become a master of short-form TikTok get-ready-with-me climate explainers? Probably not. (Although never say never, I guess.) But I do believe journalists have a responsibility to meet audiences where they are, without dumbing down the reporting. So that’s what we’re going to try and do.
What will this podcast be like?
I recommend listening to our introductory episode to find out! Did I mention it’s at the top of this newsletter?
But basically, we’re going to investigate and explain the powerful, systemic forces driving inaction on climate change. We’re going to debunk polluter-funded propaganda; call out media complicity; and press people seeking power on what they’ll actually do about the crisis. And that’s just what we have planned for our first few episodes!
We also want this to be a two-way street. So please let us know if there’s anyone in particular you’d like us to interview, or any subject you’d like to us to tackle.
How will you fund this?
HEATED has always been 100 percent reader-funded. We’ve never had fossil fuel ads, corporate sponsors, or billionaire owners with “evolving priorities.” And we never will!
Depending on how this whole thing goes, though, we might enter into the world of YouTube ad monetization. If that happens, we’ll do everything we can to ensure fossil fuel ads never grace our content. And if you want to avoid ads altogether, you can always just listen/watch on the newsletter.
Really, though, this whole thing is going to depend on our community.
For now, the podcast will be free while we gauge interest and grow the audience. But producing a high-quality video podcast takes real work: booking, research, editing, distribution, all that jazz.
So if you value HEATED and want to see it reach more people in more formats—while remaining 100 percent independent—becoming a paid subscriber is what will make that possible.
Text transcript:
Emily Atkin: The billionaires who control our information systems do not want you informed about climate change.
The last few years have seen major declines in climate change news coverage across the U.S. and abroad. We’ve seen entire climate reporting teams laid off or reassigned, big newspapers running fewer climate investigations, and climate all but disappearing from television coverage.
One of the most concerning recent examples was at CBS News, which used to run some of the best climate coverage on network television. They were so good at not only covering the science of climate change, but critically looking at the polluters contributing to it and the politicians delaying action.
But after David Ellison, the son of MAGA billionaire Larry Ellison, bought the parent company Paramount Global last year and installed anti-woke opinion writer Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief, he dismantled the network’s climate reporting team. The reason, Ellison said, was that he was “phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.”
I reported on the CBS News climate layoffs for my newsletter, Heated, back in October. And when I was talking to sources both inside and outside the newsroom about it, they kept bringing up one impacted member of the climate team, Tracy Wholf.
Tracy Wholf was the senior climate producer at CBS News, and everyone told me that she was the heart of the CBS climate team. She was the one pushing for more accountability stories, educating the entire newsroom about climate science and making sure local CBS affiliates had the resources and confidence to cover climate. One newsroom source told me, “Without Tracy, there is no climate unit.”
Covering Tracy’s firing honestly left me pretty frustrated because the fact is we simply cannot afford to lose more journalists like her. As climate change accelerates and polluters spend billions to delay action so they can profit, 2e need more reporters asking hard questions, following the money, and explaining the science in ways ordinary people can actually understand.
But here’s the good news. Turns out my worry was short-lived, because a few weeks later, Tracy reached out to me and said:
Tracy Wholf: Hey, Emily, have you ever thought of starting a podcast?
Emily Atkin: This is Heated, a podcast dedicated to covering climate change, whether the billionaire-owned media class likes it or not. I’m your host, Emily Atkin.
Tracy Wholf: And I’m her producer, Tracy Wholf.
Emily Atkin: On this show, we’ll break down the most urgent and growing climate threats, shine a light on the powerful interests pushing delay, and challenge misinformation head on.
Tracy Wholf: We’ll also feature conversations with scientists, policymakers, activists, and journalists working on the front lines of the climate story.
Emily Atkin: Our goal is to provide you a truly independent, unbought source of information about climate change, pollution and environmental harms.
Tracy Wholf: We have no corporate sponsors, no billionaire owners, and we take no nonprofit money. Our only source of revenue is you, our audience.
Emily Atkin: Today’s episode is just a little table setter to introduce you to me and Tracy so you can learn a little more about our histories and decide whether we’re people you want to trust on this topic. So let’s get into it.
Tracy, why don’t you tell the people a little about how you became a reporter? Like what made you want to do this job?
Tracy Wholf: Well, it was definitely for the steady income and the work-life balance.
Emily Atkin: For sure. Oy vey.
Tracy Wholf: Hilariously, so journalism was actually a second career for me. I originally went to undergrad and was a theater major. And I spent the first 10 years of my adult life performing, which is also a roller coaster of unemployment and low paychecks.
So I thought, hey, why not like go back to school, get my master’s in journalism and go into that?
Emily Atkin: So you weren’t like, let’s go into finance.
Tracy Wholf: No, I didn’t take that advice, right? But it was funny. My first job in journalism, I actually worked for Dan Rather on a show called Dan Rather Reports. I was covering the 2012 Republican primary down in Florida, and I had picked up the Orlando Sentinel newspaper on my way to like, Mitt Romney spaghetti dinner. hell yeah.
And there was a story at the very bottom of the front page that said pythons, which are invasive species in the Everglades, were eating native mammals to the point of extinction. And it just kind of blew my mind. And so I took the newspaper back to my executive producer when I was back in the office in New York a few days later. I showed it to him, and he was like, you should go back. You should go on a python hunt. And I thought, OK, why not?
Yeah, we went down and we did a python hunt. And this was back before, like now they do python hunts every year to try to control the species. And, you all these hunters come out and try to catch as many pythons as they can. But back then there were like two guys that did this. And so I went into the Everglades with one of them and we walked around and around and around. And finally, at like the last hour of our hike, we found this nine foot female who was like hidden in the grass. And he just like walked over and like, you know, grabbed it with his hand.
And we captured it, and a few weeks later we found out through necropsy that she had 19 eggs inside of her. And that’s how I got into environmental journalism. From there I went to work for PBS News Hour Weekend, which rested soul, also just ceased production fairly recently. And then I moved to National Geographic and I did a really cool documentary series called Years of Living Dangerously. And I went to the Middle East with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I went to China with Sigourney Weaver and looked at climate change issues.
And then Donald Trump got elected in 2016 and I was like, woo, need to maybe take a pause here for a hot second. And I went to ESPN and was doing some investigative reporting with them for a couple of years. But towards the end of my tenure at ESPN, was still really itching to do climate journalism. And then eventually, because Joe Biden got elected, there was a lot of interest in talking about climate policy. A lot of the networks wanted to cover climate change again. So I went over to ABC News to launch the climate unit and then eventually moved to CBS.
And then you told what happened, so here I am with you.
Emily Atkin: That’s so cool, though. I mean, you’ve had such a cool career in climate environmental journalism since you started. I mean, what made you want to stay in the environmental and climate space, even though you were covering Mitt Romney?
Tracy Wholf: Yeah. I mean, I think what happens when you start to cover climate and the environment is you really start to understand what’s going on in the natural world around us. And I think it’s just really hard to look away, right?
When I took my little break to go to ESPN, I was really excited to cover sports. But even when I was at ESPN, I took that job because I wanted to cover really hard topics through the lens of sports. And so I eventually started covering climate change through the lens of sports. It’s such a good topic to focus on climate. There’s so many climate angles and sports stories. so climate change is a beat in the newsroom that really infects so many other topics, right? Like it’s a business story. It’s a national security story. And so I just really found that I was able to cover climate change, but also cover a lot of other topics that were really interesting to me.
But I was never able to ignore what was going on in the climate because it just had so many dire consequences. But I always did climate through television, video.
You, on the other hand, took a more traditional route. So how did you get into it?
Emily Atkin: Yeah, well, I always wanted to be a journalist since I found out that that was a job that you could do.
Which actually was like not until I was 18 or 19 years old. For some reason, it just never occurred to me that that was a job you could do until I took a journalism 101 class. And this is really embarrassing, but I’ll just tell you. When I took my journalism, my first journalism class in college, I was like a freshman in college. I didn’t know what I was signing up for. I thought it was like a class that you took on how to write a journal. I literally did not know that journalists, like maybe like a creative writing class or whatever. I really did not know.
I was just like a college student, like, whatever, I’ll sign up for anything. I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. And I took this class and the professor was this former reporter for the Staten Island advance. And he was just your stereotypical old school reporter who had this fierce love of the First Amendment and what journalism’s role in society was. Preserving democracy, you can’t have a functioning democracy without a free press. That’s why the founders wrote it into the Constitution, because they understood that good information was fundamental to a functioning democracy. And as a journalist, it is your role, your primary role to protect democracy through telling the truth. And I just fell in love with it immediately. And it was sort of like, it was like it snapped in my head. I was like, I’m never doing anything else.
And something about me is thatwhen I get really determined that I’m gonna do something, you actually can’t convince me that I’m gonna do anything else. People would be like, what’s your plan B if journalism doesn’t work out? Journalism, famously stable job industry. I was like, there is no plan B. It will work out for me. So I just loved the idea that I could help people parse fact from fiction. I could hold power to account. And I would by extension be performing a public service.
But I will say I never saw myself as a climate reporter. I wanted to be a politics reporter, a campaign reporter. But it turns out it’s really hard to get a job as a political reporter, especially when you’re right out of college.
Tracy Wholf: It’s a little competitive.
Emily Atkin: Yeah. It’s the most competitive job you can get, at least in this space. And so I applied to a climate reporting position at this place called ThinkProgress. I was working at a legal trade publication called Law 360. I applied to this climate reporting position thinking that the pool of applicants would not be as big and I could use that to get into a bigger newsroom, a more public facing newsroom and then use that to inform my future political coverage, like sell myself to another newsroom.
So that’s what happened. I was on the climate desk at ThinkProgress for three years. I was a climate reporter. I got promoted to climate editor and then I went to my editor and I was like, hey, I would really like to switch desks and I got to do that. So I was covered the 2016 presidential election, traveled the country covering all these candidates. There was like a million Republican candidates in the field at the time, Bernie and Hillary too, on the Democratic side. And then I switched over to a political reporting job at Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is actually a conservative leaning television conglomerate. But also I was covering politics and also I would try to cover climate change there as well.
But I sort of over time began to realize that like political reporting as a job was not what I always dreamed it to be. It was kind of a grind that didn’t seem to have much of a purpose because the media environment was so saturated. I didn’t really feel like there was a huge need for me. And also I felt like a lot of the stories were so like only relevant for less than 24 hours, not really.
I don’t know, not really helping people. And I started to realize that the climate story was actually far more interesting, far more necessary. I realized that it was everything I wanted to do, everything I was passionate about, why I got into this job in the first place. Like, educating people about a complex problem. You’re giving voice to voiceless victims. And you’re shining light on powerful people, the perpetrators of this crisis, who profit from it.
So it’s the ultimate accountability journalism story. And so was like, all right, Sinclair Broadcast Group isn’t going to give me the bandwidth to do this. No? You don’t think? Why? Story for another time. But so then I went, I applied for another job and I got a job at the New Republic where I covered climate change for another three years before I started my own publication, Heated, which this is an extension of that. So. Yeah.
But it’s interesting and I’m so happy to be doing this with you because one of the things I learned at Sinclair and then one of the things that I’ve been covering a lot at Heated is this lack of climate coverage on network news, on television news, where so many people get their news. Maybe you could give us some insight into why we don’t see climate on TV very much.
Tracy Wholf: Well, I think you used to see it a lot. Like, for example, when I first got to ABC News in the fall of 2021, the World News Tonight broadcast live from Glasgow from the COP that year. That’s huge. Like David Muir was at the COP to talk about climate policy on the international stage. So there was a point where climate was covered really heavily by the networks. There were really robust reporting teams at NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN.
But in talking to lot of executives in network news, they really saw climate journalism as a public service, something that, you know, it checked a really nice box. They felt like it was something that the public needed. I would say there’s a lot of research out there that shows that audiences really want climate reporting, especially in the news. But I think what we’ve started to see lately is there has been a dip in that coverage, especially as with this new Trump administration coming in.
We’ve just seen corporations really change their tone on you know, ESG environment, their sustainability goals. And so I think you started to see that in the media landscape too. And so unfortunately, you know, network news is undergoing a digital transformation that’s really changing the budgets of newsrooms. And so one of the first things to go are those climate teams.
Also climate journalism on TV, it’s really hard. You have to have really strong visuals. And so that can be expensive depending on where those visuals are. I mean, the number of times I would have reporters come into my office and be like, “Hey, I’ve got a pitch to go to Alaska.” I’d be like, can you put another dollar in my pitch jar? Because everyone wanted to go to Alaska to do stories. And I get it. It’s a super critical place to do climate reporting. But it’s also really expensive. It’s really hard to get to. It’s really dangerous, depending on the time of year that you want to go there. But more importantly, in an evening news situation, there’s
Not even 30 minutes that we need to fill with the news. That’s not a lot of time. And so when you think of, especially today, just the fire hose of stories that are happening, sometimes it’s really hard for climate stories to rise, as we would say in print, above the fold or rise to the top of the rundown in broadcast because there’s just so many other things that feels like they need to be reported on in that very short amount of time.
So climate journalism is kind of a slow burn sometimes. It’s not always breaking news when there’s big hurricanes, big fires. Yes, we make those connections there. And that was something that we were always trying to elevate and do. But it just became harder. It became a lot harder. And on some level, I understand the pressure that newsrooms are under to deliver the most topical stories under tight budgets. But it’s really a shame because it’s still a really critical, valuable story that deserves reporting, that needs that accountability. And I’m hopeful that that’s something that we can do here.
Emily Atkin: Me too. I mean, one of the things that frustrates me about this whole thing is that I feel, tell me if you think I’m wrong about this, but I feel like the climate story is much easier to cover and justify as one of those harder hitting, fast moving stories if you are willing to approach it as an accountability story. If you’re willing to approach it as a story of powerful people taking advantage of powerless people.
If you’re willing to call out the fact that climate change is not bad because we’re all taking too many individual flights, no, it’s bad because corporations have poured billions of dollars into delay despite knowing the consequences of what they’re doing. If you’re willing to cover it like that, it’s not that hard to cover. I don’t think.
But I feel a reluctance in a lot of mainstream media to cover it that way, or at least cover it that way all the time, because they don’t want to be seen as taking a side, as being an activist. That’s at least what I’ve seen. And that’s sort of why I went on my own.
Tracy Wholf: Right. Well, I think there’s always been a misconception that climate journalism is a form of activism. And I would argue it’s absolutely not. Like, we cover climate the same way a crime reporter would cover gun policies, right? And the reality is, if you want less deaths from guns, then maybe you need to limit the access to guns. That’s not taking an activist stance. It’s showing you there’s a problem and a solution, and this is the reality.
I think we do the same thing as climate journalists. There’s a problem. There’s a very obvious solution. Here is what’s preventing that solution from becoming a reality. And we’re going to explain to you why. And we’re also going to talk to you about why this isn’t in the best interest of certain businesses.
I think a big challenge that you and I have always had in our careers is trying to prove to people, I am not an activist. I am not a tree hugger. We really are trying to come at these stories from a very critical lens, from ethics and standards of journalism to bring you the reporting.
Emily Atkin: Yeah, absolutely. I hear myself sometimes talking about climate change and talking about how policy to reduce carbon in a systemic way is the only way to solve this problem. And I hear myself and I’m like, am I being an activist right now? Am I being annoying? And I’m like, no, this is what the research shows. This is my job as a journalist, you know?
And I really want to illustrate those systemic drivers of environmental harms on real people, not just limited to climate change, with this show. As a journalist, that’s like what I’m really passionate about doing. Because of course, we all consume energy. We all have a role to play in driving this crisis, but we as individual people do not set energy policy. There are way more powerful forces at work driving the climate crisis and people deserve to know about them.
Tracy Wholf: Yeah. I mean, what you and I aim to do with this podcast is we will bring on the best guests to the show that sit in these spaces where change is happening. We’re going to continue to lean on the reporting that you’ve done, that I’ve done in our careers. We will break news. We will analyze it.
And we really want to see Heated in other spaces, not just on Substack, but beyond. Because I think it’s really important at this time, we shouldn’t be diminishing climate journalism. We should really be elevating it and pushing it because it’s more critical now than ever.
Emily Atkin: Yeah. I’m really excited about doing this with you. I’m really excited about some of the episodes and interviews that we have planned.
So if this sounds like something that you, dear listener, would be interested in, you can follow Heated on YouTube or really wherever you get podcasts will be. But you can find our full reporting, our companion writing and community discussions on Substack, which is where we’ll be the most. So search Heated and Substack, or you can just type heated.world into the search bar.
We’re really excited and see you soon.
