Murdoch's red hot legacy of climate denial

Coverage of the UK's current heatwave continues to focus on the fantasy of sun-seekers heading to the beach over the reality of an overheated future.

Previously: Girls in Afghanistan are being sold; why did the BBC focus on the pain of the fathers doing the selling?

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Most British newspapers write about extremely hot weather with the tone of a frog in a boiling pot pretending it’s a jacuzzi. Unsurprisingly, the Murdoch-owned titles are at the forefront of downplaying the dangers of climate change. The climate scientist, Dr Joëlle Gergis, summed up Rupert Murdoch’s ‘contribution’ in 2023 when she said:

It’s hard to think of another person who has single-handedly done more to muddy the public’s understanding of climate change. We have wasted decades debating the fundamental science in the media, when we really should have been focused on urgently implementing climate policies that will genuinely reduce emissions. Murdoch will be looked back on by historians as someone who used their media monopoly to influence the destabilisation of the Earth’s climate.

Under the stewardship of Murdoch’s mini-me son, Lachlan, News Corp has continued to attack attempts to treat climate change seriously. In 2025, when Australia’s first national climate risk assessment was published, the News Corp-owned Daily Telegraph used its front page to dismiss the report as “science fiction”. It accused its author of penning “climate doom ‘fiction’”. The single source for that claim was a US-based political scientist called Roger Pielke, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative thinktank that vehemently opposes climate action.

As I sit in my office today, sweltering in what used to be unseasonable temperatures for May, I wanted to look at coverage from The Sun and The Times to analyse how the deliberate unseriousness about climate change continues.

Here are the headlines of three Sun stories on the hot weather published over the past few days:

RUM-BELIEVABLE UK to be hotter than Barbados over Bank Holiday weekend as amber health alert issued with temperatures soaring to 33C

FUN IN THE SUN Beach-goers bask in ‘historic’ 34.8C sun as Britain records hottest May day EVER – with heatwave to continue for days

TROPIC LIKE IT’S HOT UK officially has ‘tropical night’, says Met Office – with Brits set to enjoy another day of sun as temp could hit 36C

The word “climate” does not appear once in any of those reports. What you do get, however, is an image of two women in bikinis to illustrate the first story, a packed beach pictured at the top of the second, and a photo of a similarly rammed seafront in Bournemouth beneath the headline of the third.

In two of three reports, the fact that parts of the UK have seen temperatures higher than “Lagos in Nigeria, Cairo in Egypt, and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam” is repeated as an interesting tidbit rather than a warning sign. The stories note that The Sun has lifted the detail from a BBC report, but unlike the broadcaster, it doesn’t follow it with details of the amber health warning from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) that suggests there’s a risk of significant impact across health and social care services.

The 80s-style tabloidese talking about “the mercury [beginning] to climb” coupled with photo selections that focus on “sunseekers” at the beach and people enjoying ice creams, gives the impression of everyone being delighted by the heat. In the one report that does include some focus on the UKHSA warning, it comes after those images of women frolicking in bikinis.

Any discussion of the wider reasons for the heatwave is totally absent. It’s treated as a novel event rather than as part of a long-term trend.

Over at The Times, the tone is, as you’d expect, more serious. However, when you look at how the paper’s stories are structured — and the response from readers in the comments section — it’s clear that climate change is still massively underplayed. Let’s start with a story published on Sunday:

UK weather: Temperatures could hit 35C on baking bank holiday Monday

The piece is illustrated with the same image of Bournemouth beach that appeared in one of The Sun’s stories. It opens:

Temperatures could soar to 35C on an exceptionally hot bank holiday Monday before isolated thunderstorms sweep in.

It follows the UK’s hottest May day for at least 79 years. Zoo staff treated animals to ice lollies and Britons dashed to packed beaches to cool off.

Here we are again with the kind of children’s book picture of jolly japes in the sun. The focus in the quotes sourced from the Met Office is on records being broken. A reference to a boy who disappeared while swimming in Swanholme Lakes in Lincoln is sandwiched in between more details on the potential for record-breaking temperatures and ‘good news’ for people who had outdoor plans on Monday evening.

The next story..

UK weather: bank holiday Monday hottest May day on record

… from Monday evening belongs in the category, ‘things we said would happen have happened’. Again, the focus is on record-breaking:

The record for the hottest May day ever has been broken, with a temperature of 34.8C recorded at Kew Gardens in southwest London on Monday.

The previous record for May was 32.8C, which was recorded in 1922 and again in 1944.

And that familiar fact from The Sun stories makes another appearance with an extra city (Damascus) added to the roll call:

Southern England on Monday afternoon was hotter than Lagos, Cairo, Damascus and Hanoi, sizzling in temperatures as much as 14C higher than average for late May.

Colour is provided by more details on those London Zoo lollies…

Predators are being fed blood-based lollies, the otters’ were made of frozen shrimp and crayfish, and the gorillas’ were made from fruit tea.

… and a report from the cheese-rolling race at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucestershire:

The dry, hard ground was not ideal for the competitors trying to chase a 7lb Double Gloucester down the hill. For the third year in a row, the winner was the German Tom Kopke. “If that hill is hell, I’m the devil,” he told the BBC. The cheese-rolling race has happened annually at Cooper’s Hill since at least 1836.

The bad and grim news is buried much further down the page. Firstly…

In Sussex and Kent, meanwhile, 500 households had to make do with bottled water after their water supply was disrupted.

… and then with details of the death of the boy mentioned in the previous day’s report:

The body of 15-year-old Declan Sawyer, who died while swimming in Swanholme Lakes in Lincolnshire, was recovered on Sunday, after emergency services were called to the scene.

Despite the report being written by The Times’ Environment Correspondent, the only references to climate change come right at the end. Two experts are quoted — Greg Dewhurst, a senior Met Office meteorologist, and Professor Hannah Cloke of the University of Reading — both of whom say that climate change is responsible for heat levels that would usually not be expected until late June or early July.

The final paragraph of the story reads:

Last week the government’s independent advisers at the Climate Change Committee called for the mass installation of air-conditioning in much of Britain’s housing stock, warning that many houses would prove dangerously stifling in summers to come. They added that by 2050 Britain could be experiencing heatwaves of up to 45C unless countries speed up efforts to cut their use of fossil fuels.

That’s a quintessential case of burying the lede. Putting the fun and frolics at the beach above the fact that fossil fuel consumption is condemning us to frying in the future and boiling in the present is true frog in the imaginary jacuzzi thinking.

In the comments, a reader crows:

So it’s a hot week in May slightly warmer than 1922 and 1944, and it’s the end of the world. Shock horror stop the cows farting, do something anything quick or we are all going to to die.

That’s Rupert Murdoch’s legacy summed up in every stupid syllable.

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