Climate Stories That Can Bridge Political Divides
after reaching $787M settlement with Dominion over election claims.
As James Murdoch stepped away from the family business, he made clear that he didn't approve of the direction he saw it taking.Leaving his executive role and later his board seat, the younger son of conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch issued statements criticizing coverage at Fox News and other Murdoch properties — specifically decrying the “ongoing denial” of climate science by their Australian newspapers during a season of massive wildfires. He quickly reinvented himself as a center-left benefactor, donating to environmental and democracy-supporting causes.
But even in unofficial exile, James remained a lurking potential threat to his father’s plans to tie the company’s future to eldest son and ideological soul mate Lachlan, the chair of News Corp and executive chair and chief executive of Fox Corporation.
Rupert’s liberal-leaning daughter-in-law thinks a doom-and-gloom attitude is thwarting climate action. She and Ari Wallach have a new documentary promoting a brighter future.NEW YORK — In 2006, Kathryn Murdoch watched a documentary that scared her.
It was “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s treatise on the dire threat of global warming. Murdoch had young children at the time and grew alarmed about the future they were facing. Married into one of the richest families in the world, she set out to use the resources at her disposal to do something about it.
She started with environmental projects, such as the Clinton Climate Initiative and the Environmental Defense Fund. Then, realizing that partisan gridlock in Congress was hindering action on climate, she turned her attention to voting reform. In the meantime, she identified yet another obstacle — this one located in the minds of the millions of people the climate movement desperately needs to activate:
The sense that the future is doomed and we’re helpless to do anything about it.
“If you keep pushing that fear button over and over and over again, it stops working,” Murdoch said in an interview last week. “And people start saying, ‘I don’t think about it anymore. It’s too big. It’s too hard. It’s too scary. And I don’t know what I can do anymore.’”
“A Brief History of the Future,” a six-part series that debuted on PBS last week, showcases “some of the people that are working really hard to make it go right,” she said, whether in food production, clean energy, pro-democracy or economics.