![]() ![]() While gushing about her parents, her mother was a midwife, and her father was an agricultural engineer from Iran. Rita Panahi was born on 2nd March 1976 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, which makes her 42 years of age. Her family was penniless.īut, today, Rita is an Ameican-born Iranian Australian opinion columnist, who works for The Herald and Weekly Times (HWT), and a subsidiary of News Corp Australia.īesides, the controversial critic of Islam, Rita is a single mum with a real estate portfolio. In late-October, Rupert Murdoch’s Australian executives announced a new project that would look to ease its climate denial through a run of features and editorials across the parent company’s newspapers-which along with the national broadsheet, The Australian, include the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph and Courier Mail, among others-and its 24-hour news service, Sky News Australia.Fleeing from Iran as a child, for Australia, Rita Panahi only knew two English words. The attacks were so relentless, Rudd told VICE last year, that he’d wake up “every morning” and wonder “how they would seek to crucify” them that day.Īs COP26 drew to a close last year, the same newspapers that were at the centre of the campaign that would spell Rudd’s demise more than a decade earlier, changed tack. In September last year, VICE News reported that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has thought that carbon pricing-an economic mechanism that forces companies to pay for the carbon they release into the atmosphere-is a good idea, since 2006.Īccording to the news behemoth’s submissions to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a non-profit which catalogues and rates environmental reporting from more than 300 of the world’s largest companies, News Corp has been advocating for “market-based mechanisms to support carbon reductions” both in the US and other places, for the better part of two decades.Īustralians will know well that the same “market-based” mechanism is what rained hell on former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s leadership, in the wake of a brutal, anti-Labor-or, anti-climate-News Corp media campaign which eventually saw him ejected from office in 2013. Posts sowing doubt over climate science across all platforms through the UN’s COP26 summit on climate change last year came to form more than 14,400 tweets and 855 Facebook posts throughout the summit. Nigel Farage, the prolific, anti-Europe, climate-denying former UKIP leader, has also used Sky News Australia’s content to leverage any number of questionable ideals, while locals and frequent guests, Pauline Hanson and Matt Canavan, have done the same in Australia. Throughout the course of the UN’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow late last year, ISD found, some of the content that saw the highest traction could be traced back to Sky News Australia, and was regularly used as a source citation among some of the world’s loudest climate deniers as well as other, more rogue ultra-right-wing provocateurs.Īmong the most prominent denialists to have cited the channel on climate include Patrick Moore (a rogue, former Greenpeace executive who calls the wind and solar industries a “parasite”), the Norwegian climate denier Per Strandberg, and the British, self-described “libertarian” Richard Delingpole, who in 2020 spruiked “The Great Reset” conspiracy theory, and often enjoys signal boosts from his brother, James, who is a contributor to the populist right-wing content farm, Breitbart. The news channel, according to ISD, has become a sort of “ground zero” for climate science antagonists around the world. In a new set of analysis conducted by the British think tank the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), Sky News Australia was described as a “content hub” for right-wing influencers, climate “sceptics” and other climate-delaying/denying media outlets around the world. ![]() More often than not, the personalities all have one thing in common: their employer, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.īut few have been as efficient in cultivating them as Sky News Australia, where climate denialism has been bred at an industrial scale, for decades, and hosts like Panahi have been given carte blanche to run riot on the issue ad nauseum. At the centre of it is a small crop of climate deniers and “delayers”, who capitalise on “disproportionate” online reach and lean on the support of their colleagues at legacy print, radio and TV outlets. Panahi’s right-wing voice, and the 24-hour news channel she calls home, have become central figures in the world’s climate misinformation ecosystem, according to a new report. Panahi has turned flipping climate scepticism into a living, and antagonising proponents of climate science- “ideological crazies” who could even, somehow, be to blame for Australia’s current energy crisis-is all a part of the routine. ![]() For viewers of Panahi’s show, which reaches millions, and her near 300,000 followers on Twitter, the call was unsurprising.
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