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Kiley Bense sees her home state of Pennsylvania as a microcosm of national tensions: a contentious swing state in the presidential election last fall that has felt both the economic pain of lost industries and the devastating impacts of the fossil fuel industry on health and the environment. “We just have such a long history with fossil fuels,” she told me recently, noting that the first oil well in America was drilled in Titusville in 1859. “It’s so important to our economy.” Bense cut her teeth as a political and cultural reporter in New York, then returned to Pennsylvania in 2021 to write for Inside Climate News, where she has been the state reporter for the past year and a half, covering the intersection of climate, health, and politics. During the presidential campaign, she reported on divisions in opinion about Pennsylvania’s fracking operations (the process of extracting natural gas from shale deposits). In many ways, she has been watching her home state wrestle with the existential questions of whether, and how, it can change its trajectory.
Now—following the election of a president who touts the line “Drill, baby, drill”; is waging a tariff war ostensibly aimed at bringing industry back to the US; and is doubling down on climate denial—Pennsylvania is poised to reap both the rewards and the consequences. There’s a lot for Bense to cover. But cuts to federal research and programs, as well as the removal of a great deal of climate science and environmental data from government websites, have made that coverage a lot more challenging. Recently, I reached out to Bense to learn more about the nuances of climate reporting in Pennsylvania, the impacts of the new administration on her coverage, and the challenges she is facing in accessing information. We spoke by video call on May 7. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
LW: How has your reporting been affected by the new administration?
KB: It can sometimes feel like every story I write has an addendum that is Trump-related, because the changes are so sweeping and affect so many things to do with the environment and with climate change; whether I’m writing about a hazardous-waste landfill or rail bridge safety, there is some implication from all the changes in federal policy. But I’m trying not to lose sight of the larger projects that I’m working on and the agenda that I had before all of this happened. I’ve had this long-term focus on the impact of the oil and gas industry, especially the waste that it generates. And I think it’s important, as reporters who are trying to cover everything that’s happening, that we don’t lose sight of what our priorities are.
[The reporting process] certainly has changed when it comes to dealing with the federal government. Not that I was doing that all the time—I’m doing local and state and regional reporting, so I’d more often be contacting the state or state departments—but when I need to talk to the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, that certainly has changed. It’s just harder to communicate with them; some of the people who I talked to before maybe aren’t there anymore or aren’t responding. Some of the websites that I relied on that the EPA runs for information [aren’t there anymore either]. The EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool was taken offline.
What would you use that tool for? Is there an example of a story that’s been affected by you losing that access?
I did this very long-term investigative piece about a hazardous landfill in western Pennsylvania. I started working on it in June of last year. It was finally published in February. [Using the tool], you can type in a facility or an address or a town, and it would give you a report on environmental justice indicators for that community. It was really helpful for getting another data point—another source that tells me who lives in that community, what the demographics are, what the health indicators are. I downloaded all the reports before the change in administration, but [when my story was published] I wasn’t able to link to the live website anymore, because it was gone. Looking forward, if I were to do another story like that—which is likely, because I do that kind of thing a lot—I wouldn’t be able to generate a report and have a government source that can aggregate the data alongside, and that is really helpful for understanding what’s happening.
Are there any other examples of ways that your work has changed?
I’ve been doing more national reporting because of the onslaught of breaking news. We’re all getting pulled into that more, and we have this effort to keep up with what’s happening and inform the public. But when I do that, I really try to show the local impact or the local perspective as much as possible, even if that’s not about Pennsylvania. For example, I did a story about cuts to LIHEAP funding, which is the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. I wrote about that through the lens of how it’s affecting Pennsylvanians even though it’s a national program.
You recently cowrote a piece with six of your colleagues that looked at the first hundred days of Trump’s second administration. It mentions that covering the administration is a master class on doublespeak. How do you address that in your reporting?
When you report on politics, you expect that politicians are going to spin things; I think that that’s normal and expected. But the administration’s approach to messaging is way beyond that. Inside Climate News is a nonpartisan newsroom; we include all perspectives. When I write about an oil company, I quote them, too; I get their perspective, and that goes for the administration as well. But it becomes complicated when they give you statements—like this Earth Day press release—where they’re saying all these things that we know, based on their policies and on the actions that they’re taking, it’s the opposite. We want to make sure that we are conveying the truth to the public as best we can and being accurate. So my approach in that article was to go point by point and say, Here’s what they said, here is what’s happening, and provide sources for each thing so that I’m not just quoting them without any context.
Within the communities you’re covering, when you’re reaching out to populations, what’s your approach to reaching people who are more susceptible to narratives of climate change denial?
That was challenging before the election as well, especially for my colleagues who are reporting in Texas, and Alabama, and other states where there’s a general distrust of the media. But I encountered it in Pennsylvania, too. At Inside Climate News, climate is in our name, which sometimes makes people wary of us. But when they look at our work—when they look at my work—they see that it’s evenhanded, it’s balanced, it’s fair. I’m interviewing a variety of sources. I’m trying to really get to the truth, and my ultimate goal is always to uplift voices of people who aren’t being heard. That tends to go a long way and makes people more likely to talk to me.
How do you stay motivated against so many waves of counternarratives and the changing policies and the lack of available information?
I won’t sugarcoat it: journalism has been embattled for a long time. But I do think that in a moment like this, journalism is more important than ever, and that is a huge motivator. I feel that my work matters. Particularly because Pennsylvania, like the rest of the United States, doesn’t have as much local news as it used to, and there are gaps in the coverage. There’s just not as many people out there doing this work. So it becomes even more important that somebody is covering this stuff.
Is there anything you’d like to highlight that you’re going to really be paying attention to moving forward?
It’s some of what I mentioned before: this push to drill more, to extract more, to export more natural gas. I’m really going to be looking at the impacts on Pennsylvanians: on their health, on their quality of life, on their ability to pay their bills. We have this long legacy of pollution, and some of that continues; for example, in western Pennsylvania, we have a steel industry that is still active, and some of those steel plants are our biggest polluters. Government oversight has not necessarily met the challenge of dealing with those plants and how they’re impacting the people who live nearby. I think particularly the attacks on environmental justice are really something to watch; to see, as months and years pass, what it will mean for some of those programs or grants that have been put forth to either curb pollution or to help environmental justice. What happens without that investment? The other thing is the impacts of climate change and how those are going to continue to evolve and, most likely, worsen. Especially with cuts to federal support for disaster recovery and prevention and climate resilience grants. Pennsylvania, like every other state, is increasingly going to be facing severe weather and extreme heat. Without as much help from the federal government, the consequences of that can potentially be dire.
How do you see climate coverage fitting into the journalism ecosystem going forward?
It touches everything. There’s pretty much no part of our lives that won’t be affected by climate change. We already are, but to pretend otherwise is to have your head in the sand. Sometimes people ask me, “Where should I move if I want to be safe from climate change?” But there’s nowhere. I wish there was. There is no safe haven. It is a global problem, and it has global consequences, and you can’t flee from it. We have reporters all over the country who report on climate change. And every place is facing the consequences of it, and it unfortunately is only going to get worse.
Are there any resources that you’d recommend that journalists, whether they’re climate reporters or not, should have in their back pocket in order to contextualize the climate implications or causes of stories they’re covering?
When you’re doing a story that’s about economics or public health, think about the climate implications. For example, I did a story about the controversy around the sale of US Steel. That had been written about a lot from an economic perspective, from a political perspective, but very few reporters had thought about the environmental or climate impacts of it. And that is a big piece of it. I think that most stories are going to have a climate angle if you just spend a few minutes considering what that might be.
After we spoke, Bense followed up with climate coverage resources that could be helpful to reporters: SEJ; IPCC; US EIA; Covering Climate Now; Yale Program on Climate Change Communication; Climate Backtracker; Federal Environmental Justice Tracker; EPA ECHO.
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, NPR and three of its member stations in Colorado sued the Trump administration over a recent executive order that directed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to defund NPR and PBS, arguing that it violates both “the expressed will of Congress,” which specifically designed the CPB to operate independently of executive interference, and the First Amendment, since Trump clearly appears to be targeting NPR on the basis of viewpoint. “It is not always obvious when the government has acted with a retaliatory purpose in violation of the First Amendment. ‘But this wolf comes as a wolf,’” the lawsuit states (quoting the late former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia). The CPB is already suing Trump for attempting to remove several members of its board; PBS has not yet sued, but said yesterday that it is still considering doing so.
- Dan Bongino, the Fox host turned deputy director of the FBI, announced that the bureau is reexamining several cases of “potential public corruption” that have garnered attention and controversy in recent years, especially on the right—including the extraordinary leak to Politico, in 2022, of the draft of the Supreme Court opinion that would go on to overturn Roe v. Wade. At the time, the marshal of the Supreme Court conducted a lengthy investigation into the provenance of the leak; it concluded that an external hack was not likely to blame, but was unable to identify an internal perpetrator. A former FBI agent told the Washington Post that reexamining cases is normal and appears justified in the case of the leak, though legal experts have questioned whether it was criminal.
- In media-business news, the Post is offering voluntary buyouts to a number of employees, including in its opinion section, which owner Jeff Bezos has controversially reoriented since Trump returned to office; Ben Mullin, the Times reporter who broke the news, called the buyouts “a big ‘are you in or out?’ moment for the staff.” Elsewhere, Breaker reports that Ari Melber, a key host on MSNBC, is weighing whether to join a rival or start his own venture as the network prepares to be spun off by its owner. And Politico trailed The Conversation with Dasha Burns, a new podcast, hosted by its White House bureau chief, that it’s billing as “a fresh take on the traditional Sunday show.”
- The Bulwark’s Lauren Egan predicts that 2028 is gearing up to be “the Substack election,” with Democratic politicians rushing to sign up to the platform. “As cable news becomes less relevant and as liberals have scattered across a variety of social media platforms, Substack has become one of the few places to offer stability: with a growing audience, a reliable information delivery system, and a variety of mechanisms (emails, Twitter-like ‘notes,’ videos, and various chat tools) to convey one’s message and engage directly with followers,” Egan writes. “The company sees an opportunity.”
- And in Argentina, Julieta Makintach—one of three judges overseeing the trial of health workers accused of criminal negligence in the death of Diego Maradona, the global soccer icon, in 2020—stepped back from the case after various parties to it alleged that she had been participating in a documentary project about the trial while it was ongoing. A prosecutor accused Makintach of behaving “like an actress,” while a defense lawyer shouted “trash!” as a teaser was played in court. The future of the trial is now in doubt.
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