every single year. And yet we don't see many public health stories, we don't see many moral crises stories addressed to that issue.
We need to be threading it through talking about absolutely everything.
STELTER: And, Emily, this also means, you know, reporters can't be scientifically illiterate. We've got to have the basic knowledge to explain how these stories are linked and how they're related.
>> Yeah, it's not an excuse that you need to talk to a climate scientist anymore to include something in your story that says this extreme heat event was made more likely by climate change, and it's a part of our climate change future. And what I would also argue is that you should probably have a sentence in there saying climate change is caused by fossil fuels because climate change is not something that's happening to us -- it's something that's being done to us. It's not simply a tragedy -- an act of God -- it is an injustice. And it is an injustice due to a 40-year campaign to lie and prioritize short-term profit over the health of vulnerable people. So those are just basic facts.
STELTER: What you're saying is it's a corruption story. You're saying it's an accountability beat.
>> It's always been that way. I think for too long journalists -- and I've been guilty of this, too. I've been covering this for eight years. And in the beginning, I really approached it out of a desire to be fair as this environment science story, trying to tell all these sides. And really, when you start looking at the history and everything that's going on right now, it's a corruption story. And that makes it sexy, to be honest -- it makes it a good story to tell. It's not -- there's a myth that it's a hard story to tell. It's a very exciting story if you don't think about how awful it.
STELTER: And therein lies the challenge, yes. Emily and David, thank you both for being here and breaking it down for us.
