Can you imagine what it would be like to see your life’s work suddenly go down the drain? I can—right now. As a former Time editor who spent 13 years editing the magazine’s coverage of environmental issues, I am in despair because Time Inc. is selling itself to Meredith Corp. in a deal that includes a $650 million investment from Charles and David Koch, whose Koch Industries is a big player in the oil and gas business and whose philanthropy has long funded climate-change denial. It is a tragic end to a Time story that was once glorious but turned sad as corporate woes increasingly affected the editorial product at one of America’s iconic news outlets. The story is not just about the fate of Time. The story is about the fate of the world.
It’s common knowledge that the modern conservative movement has already sold its soul to the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and other kingpins of the fossil-fuel industry. For decades, the Kochs’ “dark money,” as The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer called it, has financed a campaign of disinformation designed to convince the public and politicians that climate change is nothing to worry about. In fact, any reputable climate scientist will tell you that global warming is the second-greatest danger to the human race, trailing only nuclear weapons. A majority of the American public is now concerned. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are not, because they know who butters their bread. Despite 30 years of scientific warnings about global warming, Congress has not passed an effective plan to slow the burning of fossil fuels.
If the announcement of the Meredith-Time Inc. deal is to be believed, Time will not necessarily become an organ of climate denial. The Kochs’ stake is said to be a passive investment: they will have no seats on the combined company’s board of directors and “have no influence on Meriedith’s editorial or managerial operations.” But several former top Time Inc. editors, including John Huey and Richard Stengel, have expressed doubts that the Kochs would invest so much money without having hopes of using Time Inc.’s magazines to further their conservative agenda. I certainly share their skepticism.
It’s not at all certain what will happen to Time magazine itself. Meredith, which publishes such lightweight titles as Family Circle and Better Homes & Gardens, has a natural affinity to many Time Inc. publications, including People, InStyle and Real Simple. But in Meredith’s previous, unsuccessful bids for Time Inc., one of the sticking points was that Meredith did not want to acquire the heavier Time and Fortune. After the new deal closes in the first quarter of 2018, will Meredith sell those two titles to an entity controlled outright by the Kochs? That’s a scary possibility.
If Meredith keeps Time and the Kochs keep their promise to stay on the sidelines, it would be theoretically possible for the magazine to publish an objective story about climate change. But there is sure to be a chilling effect. You won’t see any Time reporting about the Kochs’ role in climate denial. And you will never see these arguably accurate lines on the cover: “The Koch Brothers: Destroying Civilization as We Know It for Their Own Short-Term Profit.”
Time was one of the first major publications to report on the environmental crisis in a big way. Even before the first Earth Day in 1970, Time established its Environment section in August of 1969. In October of 1987, Michael Lemonick wrote “The Heat is On,” the first of his many Time cover stories on global warming. In late 1988 Time’s managing editor, Henry Muller, decided to forgo the usual “Man [or Woman] of the Year” in favor of the unprecedented cover package “Planet of the Year: Endangered Earth,” which would report on the whole panoply of environmental threats, including climate change, ozone depletion, and species extinction.
That’s when I entered the picture. Muller moved me from being business editor to being science editor because he wanted me to oversee “Planet of the Year.” He knew I had once been a high-school science teacher, but I still had a lot of boning up to do. Time invited 33 top experts to a conference in Boulder, Colorado, for three days in November 1988—my crash course for editing “Planet of the Year.” My team and I listened to such luminaries as Edward O. Wilson, Gus Speth, Lester Brown, Tom Lovejoy, and Peter Raven. And, yes, Al Gore was there, as was Tim Wirth, one of Colorado’s senators.
It was a mind-blowing experience. It totally changed my life. Until then, I had no idea the planet was in such trouble. I got home to New York City and immediately sat down with my wife. My words went something like this: “You’re not going to see much of me over the next month. This is the most important thing I’ve ever done. This is about the future of our two sons. I’ve got to do this right.”
Published as the first issue of 1989, “Planet of the Year” won all sorts of awards and accolades. But of course it didn’t solve anything. Reversing the ominous environmental trends would be a daunting long-term challenge, and Muller knew our coverage could not be a one-shot deal.
That same year Time Inc. entered the age of huge corporate mergers when it combined with Warner Communications. Fortunately, the new corporate structure had no impact on Time’s editorial choices. Muller and I had free rein to run dozens of major environmental stories produced by a large group of talented writers and reporters, including Lemonick, Dick Thompson, Eugene Linden, Madeleine Nash, and Andrea Dorfman.
The work proved to be not only good journalism but also good business. Toyota and Ford, eager to promote their fuel-efficient cars, lavished advertising dollars on us to sponsor special issues. We took a fair amount of flak from some quarters of the environmental movement for recruiting corporate sponsors, who were accused of “greenwashing” their images. It was a reasonable criticism, but as long as Ford had no say over what I put into the stories, I was happy to accept $10 million to produce a single special issue of Time. When Norman Pearlstine, the editor in chief of Time Inc., and I flew to Detroit in 2000 to seal the deal with Ford Chairman Bill Ford, I really thought the world was changing.
But of course it wasn’t. While Time and other mainstream media were churning out factual stories about climate change, the Kochs and their allies were revving up their financing of an alternative narrative. Despite saying during his presidential campaign that the United States should reduce its carbon emissions to counter global warming, George W. Bush in 2001 rejected US implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, an international climate agreement. Jim Kelly, then our managing editor, promptly responded by telling me to crank up another cover story. Called simply “Global Warming,” it had a striking cover image showing Earth as a frying egg in a huge skillet.
I had the idea that the last page of the magazine should be an open letter to President Bush, urging him to recognize the peril of global warming and take action. This letter was signed by Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, John Glenn, Walter Cronkite, George Soros, J. Craig Venter, Jane Goodall, Edward O. Wilson, Harrison Ford, and Stephen Hawking. Kelly later told me that he feared my letter idea was “kind of cheesy” until an assistant to Hawking, the famed physicist afflicted by ALS, sent us Hawking’s thumbprint in lieu of a signature.
This would be my last big project as a Time staffer, and my exit that year was sparked by another one of those pesky mergers. When AOL bought Time Warner with Internet-bubble dollars in what would turn out to be one of the most disastrous mergers in corporate history, the new bosses decided to slash payrolls. They offered immediate, greatly enhanced pensions or payouts to all the older, more experienced staffers. The offers were almost irresistible, and I took one.
For a few years, I had occasional return engagements at Time as a freelancer. In 2002, I edited a cover package entitled “How to Save the Earth” that included such celebrity writers as Jane Goodall and Jared Diamond. But Time’s days of factual but outspoken coverage of the environment were already under threat. I was ordered to include an article criticizing alleged excesses of environmentalism and a sidebar featuring contrarian Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish statistician who cherry picked data to assert, just like Exxon Mobil and the Koch brothers did, that global warming was no big deal. It was the first time a top editor had inserted himself into the planning of an environmental issue and insisted we include some nonsense for the sake of “balance.”
But on the whole, Time’s climate coverage remained excellent under Kelly and my successor as science editor, Philip Elmer-DeWitt. For Earth Day 2006, Elmer-Dewitt and writer Jeffrey Kluger produced a cover story that directly challenged the Bush administration’s do-nothing approach; it was called “Global Warming: Be Worried. Be Very Worried.”
By the time Earth Day 2007 rolled around, however, Kelly had left as managing editor, while financial pressures began to have an impact on the quality of the environmental reporting. The centerpiece of the Earth Day issue was a breezy thing called “The Global Warming Survival Guide: 51 Things You Can Do to Make a Difference.” It was well-intentioned and certainly tailor-made for an Internet attention span, but in my view it trivialized the issue. That Earth Day was the only time I ever thought that Newsweek had a more in-depth environmental cover story than Time did.
Here’s where the story starts getting sad. The Internet was steadily destroying the newsmagazine business. Waves of buyouts and layoffs hit Time. The science team I had built dwindled to a handful of people. I can’t really blame management. When a newsmagazine is struggling to survive in the Internet age, you can’t easily afford to have anyone focus on environmental issues.
Meanwhile the corporate machinations continued apace. In 2009, Time Warner spun off AOL into a separate company. In 2014, it spun off Time Inc., leaving the magazine business to sink on its own.
That’s where we stand today, as Meredith and the Koch brothers take over. Time’s environmental coverage has gone from in-your-face to barely noticeable. And, despite the rapid development of wind and solar power, the world is still burning far too much fossil fuel to have any hope of curbing global warming. Last year saw a record jump in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. President Trump’s only response has been to dismantle president Obama’s climate programs and pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.
I concluded quite a while ago that my life’s work—the work I did to help insure that my two sons and now my grandson would have a decent future on a healthy planet—had failed. Now, if Charles and David Koch exert any influence over Time, my life’s work could be repudiated in the very magazine in which it appeared. The thought is almost too much to bear
I confess I don’t know what the solution is, but it would be perverse and dangerous to have two billionaires with no commitment to truth gain control of a magazine that has been a voice for reason and be able to use it in pursuit of their narrow business interests. For the moment, we will still have the harsh truth about climate change published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and The Nation. But the Internet is hurting those publications’ revenues as well, and what happens if they too get bought by the deep-pocketed titans of fossil fuel?
I still have faith that in the long ideological war over climate change, the truth will eventually prevail. The ravages of global warming will become too obvious to be denied, even by the likes of Trump. But by then the damage to the planet may be irreversible, and my beloved Time, once a soldier for truth, may be marching with the forces of greed and deception.
This is an updated version of an essay that originally on thenation.com.