Wildfire Reports Ignite Debate Over Climate Change Coverage
Wildfires are ravaging hundreds of thousands of acres of the western United States and Canada this summer, taking lives and homes in California, closing parts of Yosemite National Park to visitors and racing through forests and grasslands in Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado and British Columbia. Smoke from those fires is causing breathing difficulties as far away as Maine.
The fires have generated many human-scale stories that need telling: how residents of the city of Redding, Calif., are coping; the toll on firefighters; where low-income workers will go if their homes are destroyed by the Mendocino Complex Fire, now the state's largest-ever. NPR has told those stories and many more — and it has by and large told them well.
What NPR hasn't done is use the words "climate change" in each and every one of these reports on the fires. Should it?
