Why the UK’s recent wildfires expose not just a climate crisis, but a communications one

Mark Borkowski returns to the PRmoment Podcast’s news review with Ben Smith to unpack how the UK’s recent wildfires expose not just a climate crisis, but a communications one. The pair start from a shared frustration: despite record temperatures and terrifying imagery of homes engulfed in flames, too much coverage still skirts around climate change and instead reaches for more comfortable or distracting narratives.Borkowski argues that the migration of journalism online has created a dangerous incentive structure. News is increasingly treated as entertainment, driven by emotion and engineered for clicks rather than clarity. Here is a selection of quotes from the show:“At the moment, one of the casualties of everything moving online is an ever‑growing degree of emotional response in news. We’re generating clickbait, and there are publishers who would prefer to see conspiracy theories run riot, because it gets eyeballs on websites and news sites.” – Mark Borkowski [0:01:45]“I urge everybody to read Sarah Williams’s book, ‘Careless People’, the whistleblower’s story about Facebook. It shows how Facebook created entertainment out of news and exploited those who created it – the Times, New York Times, Washington Post, whoever – grabbing it for free, throwing it back into the platform, and creating these bubbles.” – Mark Borkowski [0:02:39]“We’ve seen profound bubbles around climate change: people who deny it and say it’s just a blip, and people who are passionate that if we don’t do something about net zero, we’re all going to burn. Yet we doubt the scientists who are giving us the facts, because we’re in our bubbles, listening only to commentators who reflect our views.” – Mark Borkowski [0:02:39]“I remember listening to a broadcast years ago, an impassioned person literally weeping on a radio show, more or less predicting what people are seeing in their homes in the Midlands today. Those pictures are vivid – ordinary middle‑class homes being enveloped by fire – and yet we still struggle to get a clear signal of common sense through all the noise.” – Mark Borkowski [0:02:39]“Somehow the communication challenge for under‑funded NGOs is to make tiny steps feel meaningful. We’ve got to get a message across that everybody has some part to play in this and each person can make a difference – and that message has to become sexier, something people genuinely believe in.” – Mark Borkowski [0:07:16]“If you look at what China is doing, they are preparing themselves for a renewable future. The wind and solar in China is outstripping anything that’s happening in America. The smarter money knows we’re going to have to rethink how we live our lives.” – Mark Borkowski [0:07:16]“I don’t think Ed Miliband was ever a successful communicator. He always felt like the brother who took power when most people would probably have preferred to see his brother in the job. When someone isn’t a great communicator in politics, it opens them up to parody, and once that sticks, there’s no real strength left in the narrative.” – Mark Borkowski [0:09:57]“You’ve got to have your facts in place, you’ve got to have charisma, you’ve got to have determination, and you’ve got to be able to take on the naysayers. My old client, Dale Vince, for all the attacks he gets, has been very single‑minded about the messages he wants to get across – and that single‑mindedness really matters in this debate.” – Mark Borkowski [0:11:10]As he puts it, “one of the casualties of everything moving online is an ever‑growing degree of emotional response in news. We’re generating clickbait, and there are publishers who would prefer to see conspiracy theories run riot, because it gets eyeballs on websites and news sites” [0:01:45].Here's a summary of the themes covered in this week's PRmoment Podcast:Social media supercharges this trend. Citing Sarah Williams’s book “Careless People,” Borkowski sketches Facebook’s role in turning news into a free raw material to be repackaged, gamified and fed back into algorithmic bubbles. “It shows how Facebook created entertainment out of news and exploited those who created it… grabbing it for free, throwing it back into the platform, and creating these bubbles” [0:02:39]. Within those bubbles, climate change becomes either a hysterical overreaction or a trivial blip, rather than a hard, shared reality.He recalls hearing, years ago, a caller “literally weeping on a radio show, more or less predicting what people are seeing in their homes in the Midlands today… ordinary middle‑class homes being enveloped by fire” [0:02:39]. The tragedy, he suggests, is that even such powerful warnings struggled to cut through the noise. Muscle memory and the next news cycle quickly drag attention elsewhere.Against this backdrop, Borkowski calls for a renewed respect for “sensible journalism” and for voices with a professional sense of responsibility, whether in traditional outlets or on platforms like Substack. He links the information chaos to a wider crisis of political leadership and authority: without trusted leaders and communicators, fear and conspiracy fill the vacuum.The imbalance is especially stark for NGOs trying to campaign on climate. Underfunded and outgunned by oil and gas lobbies, they need to reframe individual action in more compelling terms. “We’ve got to get a message across that everybody has some part to play in this and each person can make a difference – and that message has to become sexier” [0:07:16]. He points to China’s massive investment in renewables as evidence of where the “smarter money” is already going [0:07:16].Finally, Borkowski turns to political communication, using Ed Miliband as a case study in how a lack of charisma and narrative resilience can doom even a principled, passionate advocate. “You’ve got to have your facts in place, you’ve got to have charisma, you’ve got to have determination, and you’ve got to be able to take on the naysayers” [0:11:10]. On climate, as on everything else, the messenger and the message are now inseparable.Support the show