The media and climate activists: Shooting the messenger

“Sociopaths”, “vandals”, “eco-anarchists”, “fear mongers”, “fanatics”, the list could go on and on. As civil disobedience-based protests are surging in response to continued climate inaction and obstruction by political leaders, polluting companies and other vested interests, climate activists are being labelled and accused across European media. 

“The language of so-called ‘eco-extremism’ is being weaponised against groups, even groups that are using legal forms of civil disobedience to advocate for climate action,” said Jennie King, Head of Climate Research and Policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a non-profit organisation defending human rights and combating polarisation and disinformation. 

This tactic, King explained, is increasingly stark in the UK context and is developing as a trend in Germany. Out of over 400 headlines in English-, German- and French-language media framing climate activists as a “security threat”, around 80% were published by German-language outlets, according to a recent analysis by ISD. 

These included comparisons with the 1970s and 1980s left-wing extremist group Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), and references in mainstream media to an interview in the tabloid Bild which reported that a terrorism expert warned of “radicalised” climate activists. 

“There is no distinction being made between [protests] that might be counter to the mainstream or might be considered as radical, and the actual ideology that undergirds eco-extremism, [...] which has a very clear history behind it,” King said. 

ISD also found that mainstream media outlets echoing this narrative – even when the intention is to debunk connections between activists and eco-terrorism – can be “easily misused by alternative media to reinforce the “climate terrorists” messaging. 

Promoting antagonism, avoiding the real issue