Is The Gray Lady Going Soft?

The other day my wife and I heard a report on our local public radio station that mentioned the Biden Administration’s American Climate Corps (ACC) initiative, a new program seeking to recruit 20,000 young people into jobs on the front line of the climate crisis. Modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-Era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the program is a signature element of Biden’s response to what anyone with a pulse knows is the most pressing issue of our day: we’re destroying the planet through misguided economic incentives.

But despite the fact that the ACC was launched with much fanfare last Fall, my wife and I had never heard of it. We have three young adult children whose future feels in doubt because of climate change, and they’d never heard of it either — not a good sign for a program that hopes to recruit tens of thousands of people just like them. All five of us feel like we’re reasonably well informed. I mean, we read The New York Times, don’t we?

My wife was incensed. She felt personally betrayed by the Times, sensing that the publication had intentionally ignored the ACC news (she also fumed that the Biden administration must suck at comms, which is another highly relevant story). I was a bit more sanguine — I figured we probably just missed the coverage. You can’t read everything the paper publishes, after all. A quick search would tell the tale…