By Clay Waters ~
“Teenagers Fight Climate Change, From the Front — Meet the Leaders of a National Movement Called Zero Hour,” reads the headline. Is it a press release? An opinion piece? No, a full-page “news” story in Sunday’s New York Times, following the same laudatory tone and lack of journalistic rigor that characterized the paper’s coverage of the last children’s crusade, for gun control.
Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks, intern-reporter at the New York Times, orchestrated the fawning interviews of six representatives of the ostensibly teen-led movement at the D.C. offices of the Sierra Club – all participants having no doubt arrived from all over the country by non-polluting means:
Some of them met on Instagram. Others coordinated during lunchtime phone conferences. Most of them haven’t even graduated from high school.
The teenagers behind Zero Hour — an environmentally focused, creatively minded and technologically savvy nationwide coalition — are trying to build a youth-led movement to sound the alarm and call for action on climate change and environmental justice.
Zero Hour’s website is headed with an Obama slogan, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” which is certainly a clue as to the left-wing activist bent of the organization.
The story was less a journalistic experience than free full-page publicity for yet another left-wing “climate change” crusade (but without the ideological labels), complete with posed pictures of the six teens [emphasis mine]:
For the last year, a tight-knit group spanning both coasts has been organizing on social media. The teenagers kicked off their campaign with a protest on Saturday at the National Mall in Washington, along with sister marches across the country.
As sea levels rise, ice caps melt and erratic weather affects communities across the globe, they say time is running out to address climate change. The core organizing group of about 20 met with almost 40 federal lawmakers about their platforms on Thursday, and hope to inspire other teenagers to step up and demand change.
“The march is a launch. It isn’t, ‘That’s it, we’re done,’” said Jamie Margolin, the founder of Zero Hour. “It means it doesn’t give them an excuse to be like, ‘I don’t know what the kids want.’ It’s like, ‘Yes, you do.’”
They are trying to prove the adults wrong, to show that people their age are taking heed of what they see as the greatest crisis threatening their generation.
….
….for the last few years, Ms. Margolin has worked to raise awareness about climate justice issues. A passionate writer, she went through an “op-ed phase,” submitting essays to publications, like one titled “An Open Letter to Climate Change Deniers” published in the monthly magazine Teen Ink.
….
At a Princeton University summer program last year, she met other teenagers interested in taking action on climate change and created Zero Hour. They began to plan a huge protest in the nation’s capital. On social media, Ms. Margolin espoused factoids and reached out to other young activists.
Yoon-Hendricks let another activist throw in an attack on SeaWorld:
Before joining Zero Hour, Nadia Nazar considered herself mostly an animal-rights activist. When she was 12, she saw a PETA video on slaughterhouses and immediately became a vegetarian.
“I had just gotten a cat,” Ms. Nazar said. “What if my cat was that cow?”
She got her start as an activist by trying to persuade people in her neighborhood not to go to SeaWorld, which has been criticized over its treatment of animals. (“I was slightly successful in that.”)
The Times has always looked to “the children” to save the planet, even back in 1970, although back then the paper’s coverage, while just as promotional, was at least more frank in discussing the left-wing milieu that surrounded such “environmental” crusading.
Ref.: https://papundits.wordpress.com/2018/07/23/nyt-news-story-is-full-page-ad-for-latest-childrens-crusade-against-climate-change/
Teen Protestors: Learned about Climate Change in “Arthur” and “The Magic School Bus” Children’s Cartoons
2013-12-30 Students Protesting for Divestment of Fossil Fuels
By Eric Worrall – WUWT
Climate indoctrination begins at a very young age; “Arthur” is targeted at ages 4-8, “The Magic Schoolbus” is targeted at ages 3-10.
The Teen-Agers Fighting for Climate Justice
By Carolyn Kormann
July 22, 2018On Saturday, hundreds of teen-agers—loud, pensive, stubbornly determined—marched through Manhattan. They represented a movement that other teen-agers had started, last year, called Zero Hour. They were gravely concerned about politicians doing almost nothing for climate justice, and they had created a list of demands—including, most importantly, achieving negative carbon emissions by 2030.
…
Juhal and Hu are both rising seniors, at Bronx Science and Stuyvesant High School, respectively. Both want to study computer science after they graduate and remembered first learning about climate change in “Arthur” and “The Magic School Bus” cartoons. Their biggest concern is sea-level rise. “Especially because we’re both from Queens,” Johal said. “We live on an island. It’s really scary to think it won’t exist in the future.” (By the end of the next decade, sea-level rise around Queens could be greater than a foot.)
…
One of the speakers at the post-march rally was Leela Sotsky, who wore a bright-yellow-leather backpack and had long lavender nails. She called out one of her teachers at her high school in Fresh Meadows, Queens, where she will soon be a senior. “It was snowing in April, which is kind of odd,” she said. “He said it was evidence that global warming isn’t real. And I had to talk to him about it, explain that it was not evidence—that weather and climate are not the same.”
…
Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-teen-agers-fighting-for-climate-justice
A 2017 Newsbusters post “Use Clean Energy or Monsters Will Eat You” has video clips of Magic Schoolbus children’s climate messaging.
