November 19, 2021

Katie Worth

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes Emmy Award–winning investigative journalist KATIE WORTH for a discussion of her book Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught in America. She will be joined in conversation by BILL KELLER, Pultizer Prize–winning reporter and the founding editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project

Details

Investigative reporter Katie Worth reviewed scores of textbooks, built a 50-state database, and traveled to a dozen communities to talk to children and teachers about what is being taught, and found a red-blue divide in climate education. More than one-third of young adults believe that climate change is not man-made, and science instructors are being contradicted by history teachers who tell children not to worry about it.

Who has tried to influence what children learn, and how successful have they been? Worth connects the dots on oil corporations, state legislatures, school boards, libertarian thinktanks, conservative lobbyists, and textbook publishers, all of whom have learned from the fight over evolution and tobacco, and are now sowing uncertainty, confusion, and distrust about climate science, with the result that four in five Americans today don’t think there is a scientific consensus on global warming. In the words of a top climate educator, “We are the only country in the world that has had a multi-decade, multi-billion dollar deny-delay-confuse campaign.” Miseducation is the alarming story of how climate denialism was implanted in millions of school children.

About Author(s)

Katie Worth is an investigative journalist who writes about science, politics, and their myriad intersections. She joined FRONTLINE in 2015 as the inaugural FRONTLINE-Columbia Tow Journalism Fellow, and in 2018 was selected as an O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism. She has worked on several FRONTLINE’S enterprise reporting projects and co-produced the cinematic interactive story “The Last Generation,” which won an Emmy for “Outstanding New Approaches: Documentary.” Her work has appeared in Scientific AmericanNational GeographicSlate, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016.

Bill Keller is a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist, most recently serving as editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on crime and punishment in the United States. He joined the venture as founding editor in March 2014, after 30 years at the New York Times as a correspondent, editor, and Op-Ed columnist. During his eight years (2003-2011) as executive editor of the Times, the newspaper won 18 Pulitzer Prizes and expanded its audience by adapting the newsroom to the journalistic potential of the Internet.