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Welcome back to another edition of Baekdal/Basic, today we are going to talk about lack of progress, and how that is continuing to cause problems. The past week was just filled with bad examples of how we in the press are shooting ourselves in the foot, and I want to share them with you so that we can try to fix this.

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To start, let’s talk about news headlines.

News is often like the ‘boy who cried wolf’

In my latest **Baekdal/**Plus article, I illustrate how many newspapers are continually optimizing for clicks rather than substance, and how that is turning people away from the news.

The main problem is that more and more people don’t feel that news is worth reading because the next day, it has changed to the opposite anyway. So why spend your time getting the next story that doesn’t hold true just 24 hours later?

Read the full article here: “News is often like the ‘boy who cried wolf’”

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UK publishers are now publishing more anti-climate editorials than pro-climate ones

CarbonBrief recently published their annual look at newspaper editorials, and the result is outright worrying. Across UK newspapers, the share of editorials that are against climate action is now higher than the share of articles that talk about doing more to prevent climate changes.

This is also true when they looked at whether editorials were pro-renewables or anti-renewables. Again, we see a dramatic increase over the past few years where UK newspapers have turned into climate obstructionists.

Mind you, this change is not the same across all newspapers. Instead, this is caused by increased polarization of the UK press. As CarbonBrief reported:

All of the 98 editorials opposing climate action were in right-leaning titles, including the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Times and the Daily Express.

Conversely, nearly all of the 46 editorials pushing for more climate action were in the left-leaning and centrist publications the Guardian and the Financial Times. These newspapers have far lower circulations than some of the right-leaning titles.

In total, 81% of the climate-related editorials published by right-leaning newspapers in 2025 rejected climate action. As the chart below shows, this is a marked difference from just a few years ago, when the same newspapers showed a surge in enthusiasm for climate action.

So what we see here is an extremely worrying political polarization and shift, mainly coming from the political right, which is not surprising because the same thing is happening in society and with the UK political landscape. This questions the justification for editorials as a whole.

The purpose and role of editorials is to widen the scope of the news, to foster debates, add perspectives, interpretations, and arguments about current events. And in the old days before the internet, the newspapers served a very important societal role in providing the platform and space for this.

However, today, people can voice their opinions pretty much everywhere, and people do, and so having editorials doesn’t really add anything anymore. The role that it used to serve is now being overfilled to the point where the public is burning out on it. More so, it tends to just do more of the same, or just criticize things for the sake of being critical.

And when we then also see how sharply and aggressively polarized this has become over just the past few years, it really stops being editorial and instead becomes political activism paid for and provided by the newspapers. This cannot be called ‘fostering a debate’ because it’s so polarized to just a particular side. These newspapers are not fostering a debate. They are paying for advocating a specific view point.

The problem, of course, is also that it’s not “both sides”. Climate change is very real. It’s extremely well documented, well-researched, and we can see the effect of it with our own eyes. For instance, farmers in the UK had a terrible year in 2025 because the climate is becoming more unstable.

And yes, as CarbonBrief found:

By far the most common stated reason for opposing renewable energy was that it is “expensive”, with 86% of critical editorials using economic arguments as a justification.

The Sun referred to “chucking billions at unreliable renewables” while the Daily Telegraph warned of an “expensive and intermittent renewables grid”.

At the same time, editorials in supportive publications also used economic arguments in favour of renewables. The Guardian, for example, stressed the importance of building an “affordable clean-energy system” that is “built on renewables”.

Both of these cannot be true, so clearly one group of newspapers must now be facilitating misinformation? And, of course, we know which side that is. There have been plenty of studies proving that renewables are cheaper than focusing on oil rigs, oil refineries, fracking, and the extremely high cost of building new nuclear power plants etc.

Even more so, for the general public, focusing on renewables, results in very direct cost-savings for the individual household. Let me give you a simple example. My father bought a new Volvo EX40 (electric) last year, and he has solar panels on his home. Before this, he had a VW Passat Estate (petrol), and if he wanted to visit, it would cost about DKK 210 (€28) in petrol.

Well, after he bought the Volvo, he came to visit to show me the car, and then when he got back home, he called and said: “What do you think this trip cost me?”. The answer was DKK 13 (€1.75).

I mean, it’s not even close!

So to see this graph about editorials and renewables, and knowing that this massive uptick in anti-renewable focus is coming from one group of newspapers, and then also knowing that what they are saying is that it’s more expensive to drive electrics, that’s not just bad. It’s deliberate political activism and misinformation.

It’s not creating a debate. It’s obstructing the public from becoming informed.

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Speaking of not being informed…

The Guardian recently published an article highlighting the disconnect between public perception and the reality around immigration. This article was about the UK, but it’s a problem that we now see in many countries.

As The Guardian wrote.

Net migration to the UK fell by more than two-thirds to a post-pandemic low in the year ending June 2025, but 67% of the people polled thought it had increased. Among Reform voters, four in five thought immigration had grown, and more than three in five (63%) believed it had “increased significantly”

This was a good article, highlighting misconceptions, providing fact checking to the public, and much needed perspective. But here is the problem. Why does the public think this way?

As you may know, in the UK, worries about immigration are continuing to increase, even when other factors like the economy have declined. In late-2022 70% were worried about the economy, and only 22% were worried about immigration. But now 50% say they are worried about immigration, with only 54% saying they are worried about the economy.

This is quite telling. It shows us that the worries about immigration are artificial. The main argument against immigration is that it hurts jobs and lowers the economy, but that’s clearly not what people are actually worried about. So, this increase in worry about immigration has no basis in reality. It’s entirely made up because of how much it’s being focused on.

And the focus is where the problem is. Here is an example. How many articles do you think The Telegraph published in 2025 (according to their search) mentioning immigration? The answer is … 1,368 articles.

That’s almost four articles every single day of the year.

And in case you think this is specific to the Telegraph, how many articles do you think The Guardian has in their immigration (UK) section of their site? The answer is … 943 articles.

That’s 2.5 articles per day … and that’s just in their UK section. This doesn’t include their international articles about immigration around the world.

Mind you, there is a considerable difference in focus and tone between The Telegraph and The Guardian, but the volume of articles are largely the same.

So, it’s not really surprising that the UK public thinks that immigration is the most important issue facing the country, because, according to the newspapers, the volume of articles and the relentless focus on it by the newsroom certainly makes it look like the most important problem.

We, the press, are causing this. Yes, politicians love to talk about it too, but we are boosting it and facilitating this at a quite ridiculous scale. And, it’s not just in the UK. We see this everywhere. Here in Denmark, one of the newspapers recently said that 2026 was going to be an election around immigration. I’m sure it will, the politicians are certainly trying to do that. But, why are we in the press facilitating it?

A couple of years ago, I had this discussion with an Editor in Chief from a big European newspaper, and I asked them why they kept publishing so many articles about immigration. His answer was: "Because it’s what the public is focusing on!”

But, first of all, there is no rule that dictates that your newsroom focus should be whatever crazy thing the public is doing, especially not if that leads people to become misinformed about the realities of the world. The role of journalism is not to report what people think they want to hear about. Instead, it’s to make the public factfully informed about what is actually relevant. Not just in terms of presenting the facts, but also (just as importantly) in terms of what focus you have.

But secondly, the public is not focusing on this. The average person does not wake up in the morning thinking about immigration. The average person does not spend all day talking about immigration. In fact, immigration is a tiny part of people’s lives, and exists almost entirely in the abstract.

In other words, it’s not the public that is creating this focus. It’s us, the press. We are what is making the public focus on it. It’s our constant non-stop coverage that makes people think about it every single day because every single day they see it in the news.

This, however, is incredibly easy to fix. It’s all about volume, focus, and more importantly thinking about actual user-needs and relevance. Publishing three articles every single day about immigration represents a disconnect. It’s newspapers focusing on things that don’t actually align with what really impacts the public.