PNAS

Corporate PR people dealing with environmental issues are getting it done, according to a survey from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It found that the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today favor business interests over green groups in their reporting of climate change.

The survey analyzed 1,768 press releases from business, government and environmental advocacy groups from 1985 to 2014 and nearly 35K articles on climate action.

Rachel Wetts, a sociologist at Brown University and author of the survey, found that press releases opposing climate action, which made up 10 percent of the all the releases studied, received twice as much play in the press as those proposing action.

The largest corporations and business organizations did best.

Wetts was surprised that press releases from organizations providing scientific and technical services are less likely to receive news coverage than other releases in the study, suggesting that messages from organizations with greater scientific expertise get less media attention.

She told Popular Science that she anticipated that scientists with well-informed legitimate opinions would earn more coverage than less legitimate and authoritative sources.

Wetts doesn’t appreciate the power of PR.

While president Trump cannot fulfill his promise that COVID-19 is going to "just disappear" and "sooner rather than later," he can make vanish a weekly report card on how the virus is ruining the lives of millions of Americans.

The Census Bureau is killing its “household pulse survey,” a 20-minute online questionnaire on how the disease is impacting households across the country from a social and economic perspective.

The survey asks about jobs, finances, access to food, health, housing, and schooling to gauge the ongoing crisis.

It was launched in April to “quickly and efficiently deploy data collected on how people’s lives have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The survey last month found than 29M Americans do not have enough food, 28M are depressed and 44M-plus reported being nervous, anxious or on edge nearly every day.

Those results don’t fit very well into the president’s re-election narrative.