USC offers ‘health and climate change’ journalism fellowship run by ‘eco chaplain’

Later this year, a group of journalists will start a “health and climate change reporting fellowship” through the University of Southern California – but experts question the objectivity of the program.

USC’s Annenberg Center for Health Journalism and its Center for Climate Journalism and Communication are offering the paid fellowship, which includes mentoring, monthly meetings, and “two days of intensive training.”

The Program, whose mission is to “empower journalists and other communicators to tell stories about climate change” opens with a preamble that links “mega-disasters” such as “Los Angeles wildfires” and “Hurricane Helene” as effects of climate change with major health impacts. 

The inaugural director of the climate journalism center told The College Fix the program “does not presuppose that climate change is the cause of natural disasters.”

“Rather, based on decades of extensive scientific evidence, we work from the baseline that climate change can amplify the severity of disasters like fires and hurricanes,” Allison Agsten told The Fix via email. She also works on other energy and climate related issues for the university.

 In addition to running the program, she is also an “eco-chaplain within the university’s Office of Religious Life,” according to her bio. In this role, she “supports students, staff, and faculty who are coping with the consequences of climate change,” according to the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life.

The Fix also asked Agsten if the fellowship proposes to find to what extent climate change contributes, or do they need to take the stance that climate change is the primary driver behind these natural disasters.

 “We are certainly interested in working with reporters who would like to investigate the extent to which climate change impacts natural disasters,” she said.

The program lists different proposal ideas. These include “The impact of climate change in combination with other structural and health inequities – whether it be for workers cleaning up after disasters or vulnerable families and communities trying to reclaim their lives,” and “[t]rauma and other aspects of mental health related to loss and displacement.”

But a water and energy researcher with the California Policy Center said the “entire premise…is dangerously flawed.”

Quoting the preamble, Edward Ring said, “This is contrary to well documented reports that ‘mega-disasters’ are neither more frequent nor more severe than they have been historically.’ Ring has written several books about the environment and public policy. He also regularly writes about water use policy.

“It also implies, despite ample conflicting evidence, that ‘climate change’ is happening at a rate and on a trajectory that constitutes a global emergency,” he said.

The issue also requires more nuance, in Ring’s opinion. 

Ring said the fellowship makes the  “obvious point that ‘mega-disasters’ and extreme (but normal) climate events adversely affect people’s health.”

“But it ignores equally obvious facts: that cold weather kills far more people than heat on our planet which has experienced very slight warming,” he said. “It also ignores far more serious global health concerns – persistent diseases such as malaria, or pervasive and deadly malnutrition primarily caused by conflict and corruption in the afflicted nations.”

In the same email, Ring warned of the danger of reporters following pre-set narratives. 

“When a ‘climate reporter’ goes in to ‘engage the community’ knowing that their work will be recognized and amplified to the extent it blames the climate crisis and systemic equities for whatever challenges actually face these communities, they cause nothing but harm to those communities,” he said. 

He said further: “They present a prefigured narrative of victim and oppressor, a vague paradigm that accomplishes nothing except to absolve members of ‘disadvantaged communities’ from recognizing their own role in their low socioeconomic status, and the failures within their own community that might foster dramatic upward mobility if they were mitigated.”

Other environmental experts raised similar concerns.

Sterling Burnett, the director of The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy echoed Ring’s concerns in an email to The Fix, calling USC’s Annenberg Center for Climate Journalism’s Health and Climate Change a “training ground for activists, not journalists.”  

“Journalist[s] are supposed to seek and reveal the truth, not be guided by a preexisting bias concerning climate change demonstrably harming human health — and particularly the health and welfare of disadvantaged populations,” he told The Fix.

“There is no evidence, in data or trends that suggest that climate change is behind the natural disasters Annenberg takes as the point of departure for and justification of the need for its program,” he said.

“The very Annenberg center itself was established with funding from billion-dollar foundations who believe climate change is, in the center’s words, ‘the biggest story of our time,’” he said.

In his opinion, “only true believers” in climate change “need apply.”