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A record-breaking heat wave killed 65 people in Japan this week, just weeks after record flooding there killed more than 200. Record-breaking heat is also wreaking havoc in California, where the wildfire season is already worse than usual. In Greece, fast-moving fires have killed at least 80 people, and Sweden is struggling to contain more than 50 fires amid its worst drought in 74 years. Both countries have experienced all-time record-breaking temperatures this summer, as has most of the rest of the world.

Is this climate change, or merely Mother Nature? The science is clear: Heat-trapping greenhouse gases have artificially increased the average temperature across the globe, making extreme heat events more likely. This has also increased the risk of frequent and more devastating wildfires, as prolonged heat dries soil and turns vegetation into tinder.

And yet, despite these facts, there’s no climate connection to be found in much news coverage of extreme weather events across the globe—even in historically climate-conscious outlets like NPR and The New York Times. These omissions, critics say, can affect how Americans view global warming and its impact on their lives.

Major broadcast TV networks are the most glaring offenders. Media Matters reviewed 127 segments on the global heat wave that aired on ABC, CBS, and NBC this summer, and found that only one, on CBS This Morning, mentioned the connection between climate change and extreme heat. This fits a long-running pattern. As Media Matters noted, its latest annual study of broadcast coverage found that “during the height of hurricane season in 2017, neither ABC nor NBC aired a single segment on their morning, evening, or Sunday news shows that mentioned the link between climate change and hurricanes.”

Legacy print and radio news outlets are generally much better at connecting these dots. In the last five years, the Times, NPR, and The Washington Post have built large teams of reporters dedicated to explaining climate science, dissecting climate policy, and showing how global warming affects communities. But when covering extreme weather across the globe, the outlets don’t often include references to climate change.

An NPR story on Tuesday, for instance, noted that wildfires are “not unusual during Greece’s hot, dry summers,” but added that the blazes “spread so quickly that they seemed to catch everyone off guard.” The story did not mention climate change’s role in droughts and wildfires, or that Greece is currently experiencing its hottest year on record.

There were similar exclusions in other extreme-weather coverage on NPR this month: A July 10 story on Santa Barbara wildfires said fast-spreading blazes were “part of a ‘new normal.’” A July 8 story on Oregon’s drought quoted a rancher saying, “This is not normal for what we normally have here.” A July 7 story on wildfires noted the role of “Record-breaking heat.” None mentioned climate change, though—an omission that drew some criticism on Twitter.

1. I happened to listen to @NPR for a few hours this morning, and I heard three stories that are very much connected to #climatechange without anyone on the radio mentioning climate change even once.

It was surreal and disturbing.

[thread]

Geoff Brumfiel, NPR’s science editor, vigorously defended the public radio network’s climate coverage. “We’re actively working on a story, trying to see what scientists think all of these events,” he told me on Tuesday. “You don’t just want to be throwing around, ‘This is due to climate change, that is due to climate change.’” I suggested that journalists don’t need to determine whether an event was caused by climate change to make a climate connection—a journalist could merely say climate change makes extreme events such as these more likely. “It’s an interesting question if there should be boilerplate language [in extreme weather stories],” Brumfiel replied.

But for now, he said, NPR reporters must interview climate scientists before referencing the phenomenon, which is often not possible with breaking news. “You’re looking at the first-round reporting,” he said, noting that general assignment reporters or regional reporters—not science reporters—are usually the ones covering breaking weather events. “We don’t assume everything that happens is climate change, and you can make statements, but we take our reporting duties seriously.” (NPR certainly does take its climate reporting seriously; the network has five full-time climate and environment reporters, as well as a dozen member station reporters and two editors covering the subject.)

Other legacy outlets appear to be reconsidering how they cover extreme weather. Like NPR, The New York Times also published a story Greece’s wildfires on Tuesday that didn’t mention climate change. Hours later, a section was added by Times climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis that read: “The extreme conditions are in line with patterns that scientists attribute to climate change.”

Thanks very much for your feedback, Dr. Guenther. We've updated the article with information on the connection to climate change. https://t.co/nFpi93vpNZ pic.twitter.com/kY1bbBKImB

The section was added after the story was criticized on Twitter, but Pierre-Louis said it was already in the works. “I noticed it and the international desk was receptive to making the changes,” she said, noting that—like NPR—it’s not always the climate reporters who are covering the weather stories. Adding references to climate change, she said, is probably “still not obvious to people who don’t have climate change on their mind, but we’re working on it!”

Five years ago, the biggest problem with news coverage of climate change used to be that no one was covering it at all. Now, the problem is that it’s seen as a niche issue. “I think climate change is still put in a silo,” said Lisa Hymas, the climate and energy program director at Media Matters. “Some outlets recognize this is an important thing, and so they have someone covering climate, but they’re not viewing it as a massive phenomenon that affects major parts of the economy, or weather as it happens every day.”

There may also be business incentives for not covering climate change more aggressively on broadcast news, as MSNBC host Chris Hayes explained to freelance writer Elon Green. (The entire thread is worth a read.)

almost without exception. every single time we've covered it's been a palpable ratings killer. so the incentives are not great.

Rafi Letzter, a staff writer at LiveScience, echoed Hayes’s observation.

Covering climate change, with few exceptions, is a traffic killer *for Live Science*, a website for people who like science. We do it anyway, and figure out how to squeeze water out of the rock. But the level of public disinterest in the subject is hard to overstate. https://t.co/YnEdk7oZXI

There are consequences to siloing climate coverage, Hymas said. “The media’s failure to connect the dots between climate change and extreme weather happening now in the U.S. is a key part of why Americans don’t perceive climate change to be a major, priority issue,” she said. “A lot of people, even Americans who accept climate science, still believe climate change is something that happens far away, either in the future or in another country.”

Indeed, though the issue is rising in priority for many young and Hispanic voters, polling experts still don’t think the issue will be an important factor in the November midterm elections. Addressing the crisis will require getting more people to care about it in the first place. The scientific community is doing its part by providing the evidence that climate change is real, and that it’s making extreme storms, droughts, wildfires and other weather more likely. It’s up to journalists to convey those truths to public at large.

Mesut Özil, one of the best soccer players of his generation, born and raised in Gelsenkirchen, helped lead Germany to victory in the 2014 World Cup. Four years later, he has announced after months of controversy that he will never again play for the German national team. Özil says the issue is racism. His critics say the issue is Özil helping a dictator win reelection. But at its heart, international observers may find something familiar about this German controversy: in the end, whom you believe largely comes down to how you perceive the long-term European debate over integrating ethnic minorities.

In May, Özil, whose grandfather had moved from Germany to Turkey as a guest worker, posed for photos with Turkish authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom many Turkish immigrants in Germany support, despite his repressive policies in Turkey. Mercedes Benz cut him out of their advertisements, apparently no longer thinking him suited to sell their cars—an ironic position for a company with Turkish military sales, which provided Erdogan with vehicles for the Turkish army’s attack on Kurdish-held Afrin, in Syria. The German tabloid Bild ran a campaign for weeks demanding an explanation from the player.

After months of silence and a brief escape to Greece with his girlfriend, Özil released a statement on Sunday to announce his retirement from international football. The meeting with Erdogan, his letter read, was not about endorsing the ruler’s policies (which include brutally reforming his country’s education system) but about “respecting the highest office of my family’s country.” He was a football player, the letter emphasized, and not a politician. But after the German national team put in a poor showing at this year’s World Cup, the football association had made him a “scapegoat” for Germany’s loss, he said, and failed to protect him from the racist attacks of the media and the public—from the voices in Germany and other parts of Europe that jumped on Özil and another teammate at the meeting as examples of “failed integration,” to the Social Democrat politician who described the national team as “twenty-five Germans and two goatfuckers.” (The politician later apologized, claiming that his outburst was the result of “yearlong work with refugees.”)

In Özil’s letter, the person he accuses of letting him down the most is the German Football Association (DFB) President Reinhard Grindel, who he says accepted his explanation about his heritage when they met privately, only to publicly single him out after the defeat by South Korea, saying he disappointed fans by not explaining himself. “In the eyes of Grindel and his supporters, I am German when we win but I am an immigrant when we lose,“ Özil’s letter read. “People with racially discriminative backgrounds should not be allowed to work in the largest football federation in the world that has players from dual-heritage families,“

Reinhard Grindel used to sit in German chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party. He is prone to rude phone calls and writing angry letters, but is hardly the sort of right-wing extremist who will plaster the Turkish Embassy with a banner that reads “Erdogan, bring home your Turks,” as a group of brownshirt-wannabe Austrian youths currently on trial in Graz did last year.

As evidence for Grindel’s “racially discriminative background,” Özil’s letter points to a speech that Grindl gave to the Bundestag in 2004, where the footballer-turned-politician said that multiculturalism is a “a myth and lifelong lie” and that there are too many “Islamized” spaces in “our cities.” Grindel’s words might appear shocking to some, but they are not so different from long-term German policy and the conservative party’s stance at the time—that German immigrants must fully assimilate to national values and norms rather than merely learning the language and following the law. It is this ideal of “integration” that right-wingers in particular seized upon in the aftermath of the Özil-Erdogan photo, citing it as an example of those with Turkish heritage failing to become fully German.

The question, then, becomes how one reads such rhetoric: whether cultural “integration” is a valid cultural ideal, or whether the doublespeak on integration amounts to a sort of racist bad faith. Grindel accused Özil and fellow teammate Ilkay Gündogan, who also met with Erdogan, of “definitely not helping” the football association’s “integration work.” That criticism looks different in light of the history Özil’s letter cited: It seems unfair to criticize insufficient integration if you don’t actually believe that integration (and the multiculturalism that integration implies) can work in the first place. Cem Özdemir from the Green Party also criticized the Özil-Erdogan photograph as a “fatal contribution” for integration efforts, but this is a man who insisted last year that Germany’s “dominant culture” should be the constitution, after the conservative interior minister suggested defining German culture with a collection of maxims such as “We are not Burka.”

Grindel, who according to Özil’s statement, had wanted the player off the team immediately after the picture surfaced seems to be going by a tough rule for anyone to live up to: you must give me all you’ve got, but one mistake and you’re out. And while cozying up to an authoritarian is admittedly a bad look, that’s not a standard the non-Turkish-heritage players have to meet. When former team captain and current German FA ambassador Lothar Mätthaus recently posed with Vladimir Putin the protest was minimal compared to what Özil had to deal with.

Last week, I attended the trial of the group of Austrian students who hung the “Erdogan, bring home your Turks” banner across the Turkish Embassy in Vienna. The group is accused of stirring up xenophobic hatred; their defense lawyer claims that they are practicing “admissionable criticism.”

In one session, the judge asked a witness, a Kurdish man with a light southern Austrian accent whose pizzeria was vandalized with anti-Muslim stickers, what he thought about Erdogan. “Geh’bitte,” he replied: Get out. What about Turkish people who vote for Erdogan, the judge asked. “Ham,” he shot back. (“Go home.”) Everyone in the courtroom laughed. The judge smiled. The state attorney smiled. “Because you are not one of Erdogan’s Turks!” the defense lawyer cried jubilantly. Demanding that people with Turkish roots who support Erdogan be kicked out of Austria isn’t racist, he was arguing: It’s a universal criticism of integration.

Walking out of the hall, I asked one of the defendants what he thought of the day’s events. The young man, who has spoken at neo-Nazi rallies, shrugged: “He just said what we are saying.”

A day after Tronc gutted the century-old New York Daily News, the paper’s new editor, Robert York, begged his remaining staff to be patient. According to CNN’s Tom Kludt, he asked “for 30 days to give him time to demonstrate that he is taking the publication in the right direction.” The problem here is fairly obvious: Why did Tronc lay off half of the editorial staff of a venerable and essential paper like the Daily News, one of the two big tabloids in New York City, without a plan for the next 30—let alone 90 or 365—days?

York reassured the tabloid’s skeletal staff that there were no further layoffs in the foreseeable future, but they were still vexed by the “widespread confusion about why the layoffs happened before a strategic plan was developed,” Kludt wrote. Asked why they didn’t lay people off after completing a plan, Tronc Vice President Grant Whitmore responded, “That’s a very reasonable question—that’s not the way we did it.”

Tronc, formerly (and reportedly soon-to-be) the Tribune Company, is the third-largest newspaper conglomerate in the country. It manages some very important newspapers in addition to the Daily News, including The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun. Until recently, it was the owner of The Los Angeles Times, which it sold to biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, in a deal that erased the $327 million in debt it had on its books. Along with the layoffs at the Daily News, that deal tells us a lot about Tronc’s so-called business strategy, which amounts to paying a small number people off at the expense of hundreds of people’s livelihoods.

What is Tronc? That depends on the day you ask. Since it rebranded itself as Tronc two years ago (which stands for Tribune Online Content), the company has fluctuated in size. Sometimes it bids on newspapers and online commerce sites and sometimes it sells them. There have been rumors that its other properties, including the Tribune and the Daily News, are for sale, but Whitmore told staff he was “not aware” of any plans to sell the paper. Michael Ferro, Tronc’s former chairman, had exited the company earlier this year—after pocketing $15 million—but has since re-appeared to push for a cash dividend that would benefit him personally.

Throughout, one constant has remained: Tronc has cut jobs again and again. A day after the Daily News layoffs, other Tronc papers were informed of layoffs, too.

Tronc has sold itself as a forward-thinking publisher, even though its efforts at digital transformation are generally similar to those taking place at McClatchy and Gannett, its larger competitors. For the last two years, the company has been pushing its properties to reinvent themselves as leaner and “flatter,” with “fewer job titles across the newsrooms and across the company and a higher reporter-to-editor ratio,” according to emails it sent in March of this year.

But the layoffs at the Daily News expose the hollowness of this strategy—it may appeal to Wall Street but it doesn’t make sense for the actual business of producing a newspaper. The News, for instance, reduced its sports section and photography team to threadbare crews and fired many of its reporters. While the paper’s city team remains reasonably strong, it is a shadow of its former self. Breaking news reporting, if it is not merely a euphemism for aggregating news at lightning speed, requires an investment in both reporters and quality, both of which cost money that Tronc is unwilling to spend.

Tronc has claimed that the web’s efficiencies justify these draconian spending cuts. The internet, the argument goes, makes everything leaner and cheaper. But journalism doesn’t work like that, not really—especially the kind of journalism the Daily News does best, which involves deep and sustained relationships with New York communities.

Furthermore, while Tronc has been cutting journalism jobs, it has been enriching its executives. Soon-Shiong’s purchase of The Los Angeles Times went through last Friday, giving Tronc $500 million. It used $327 million of that to pay off its remaining debt to JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, but still laid off up to 80 journalists on Monday and several more the following day. In June, it was reported that the company was considering a cash dividend of $75 million from the proceeds of the sale.

Ferro’s involvement in the company is particularly egregious. He resigned as chairman in March just ahead of a Fortune report alleging that he had sexually harassed two women. But on the way out the door, he got Tronc to pay out a $15 million, three-year consulting contract in full. Since resigning from the board, Ferro has meddled with the sale of The Los Angeles Times and pushed for the $75 million cash dividend, from which he would pocket more money. Ferro is still Tronc’s largest shareholder, a position he has used to exert influence since stepping down from the company.

So Tronc is firing journalists and selling gutted newspapers when it can, while executives pocket the proceeds. Every few months there are new initiatives to compete in the digital realm, but there is no actual investment in creating journalism. Instead, corners are cut and sales are floated.

All of this is happening in a larger context. Newspapers (particularly local ones) are figuring out how to survive in the age of Facebook and Google; the advertising revenue streams that sustained them for decades have dried up. Nearly 60 percent of journalism jobs have disappeared since 2000. The Daily News’s struggles didn’t begin when Tronc purchased the company last fall—they stretch back years and likely would exist without Tronc’s interference.

Still, Tronc is robbing the coffers during this crisis. There isn’t a plan—at least not one that involves journalism. By all appearances it is looting as much as it can, while it can.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified Tronc executive Grant Whitmore as Lucas Whitmore.