Source: The Conversation – UK – By Shelley Galpin, Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London
In my former life as a teacher, I once had a job interview in which I was asked how I dealt with the problem of teaching Jane Austen to boys.
Having had experience of this situation, I confidently told my interviewer (a maths teacher) that the “problem” they were assuming didn’t actually exist, and that it was perfectly possible to teach Austen’s novels to mixed-sex classes with successful results. My answer was met by barely veiled scepticism – and suffice to say, I didn’t get the job.
But where did this popular perception come from? Austen’s genius has been recognised from the earliest days of the development of a canon of English literature, and has never really fallen out of fashion. So it might seem odd that the suitability of her work for a co-educational class is the subject of genuine debate.
This article is part of a series commemorating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Despite having published only six books, she is one of the best-known authors in history. These articles explore the legacy and life of this incredible writer.
The increasingly intertwined associations of Austen’s literature with the many (often excellent) adaptations of her work may not help the matter, with screen retellings often foregrounding the love stories and losing much of the ironic tone that characterises Austen’s narrative style.
The myriad repackaged editions of her novels that adorn bookshelves with pastel-toned floral designs, or images of anonymous portraits of passive young women, also do little to challenge the popular perception of these books as stories for women and girls.
Finally, and perhaps most troublingly, is the still-commonly held notion that stories with a female protagonist do not have wide-ranging appeal and must be consigned to a “niche interest” bracket. Male-led stories, in contrast, have long been considered to hold universal relevance for audiences.
This last point is a bigger issue concerning the publishing and entertainment industries, so I will largely park this one. But I will point out that, as others have argued in relation to Austen’s work, the classroom is an excellent place to start countering the assumptions of the “everyman” male experience, in contrast to the “special interest” attitude to female perspectives.
With regards to the teaching of Austen’s novels, drawing on my experiences both as a scholar and as a teacher, I believe her novels can speak to young readers of different genders and from diverse backgrounds.
Money, power and inequality
Addressing the ways in which Austen’s novels tend to be packaged, I asked my students, typically aged 16-18, to explore the ideas at the heart of the novels by redesigning the book covers to better reflect these themes.
The flowers and passive young women were gone. The redesigned book covers often focused on the idea of wealth, through pictures of differing piles of money, or power, such as the image of imbalanced scales to symbolise the unequal societies inhabited by Austen’s characters.
Because, as much as they are love stories, Austen’s heroines typically achieve their “happy endings” against a backdrop of money worries, power struggles, familial tension and gendered social hierarchies. While her novels are rightly celebrated for highlighting the unequal treatment of the sexes during her lifetime, it is reductive to see this as their sole contribution to social commentary.
Take Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion. Here, Anne Elliot – over the hill at the ripe old age of 27 – begins the novel by rueing her broken engagement to Captain Wentworth, which she had been persuaded to break off eight years earlier due to his lack of fortune.
While the narrative focus is on Anne, who is left to regret her choice and wonder whether she will ever be able to escape her odious father and siblings, the broken-hearted Wentworth, who reappears in Anne’s life shortly after the start of the novel, is at least as much a victim of the situation as Anne herself.
At its heart, this is a story of a young woman who allowed herself to be persuaded to make a bad choice, and a young man who, through no fault of his own, was deemed not good enough due to his lack of wealth. The experiences of these characters, although they are older than the average school student, are highly relatable and sympathetic to many teenagers, who may well have experienced meddling family members or unfair judgments of their own.
Take also Northanger Abbey, in which fanciful Catherine Morland mixes fact and fiction and imagines the titular abbey to be a site of gothic intrigue, only to discover that the real horror derives from a controlling patriarch and his sexually predatory oldest son.
Here again, the novel cleverly makes the point that social inequalities, and the choices of those motivated by their love of money and power, are the real darkness at the heart of Austen’s society.
In my experience, students of all genders have been able to appreciate and relate to Northanger Abbey’s depictions of the loss of innocence, class inequality, and the experience of being subject to the sometimes obscure decisions of more powerful individuals.
Austen’s works, far from being the simple love stories of popular perception, are also razor-sharp satires of social and gendered inequalities. Full of witty observations and universally relatable experiences, there is a reason for the consistent popularity of her writing 250 years after her birth.
To fail to recognise this in the classroom is to do a disservice to all our students, as well as to Austen herself.
Shelley Galpin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Our new study presents analysis of the UK-wide trends for three major pollutants – nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), ozone (O₃) and tiny particulate matter known as PM₂.₅ – between 2015 and 2024 to calculate how often air quality targets were breached.
Both nitrogen dioxide and PM₂.₅ showed robust decreases over the period 2015-2024, declining on average by 35% and 30% respectively. In 2015-2016, the average Defra monitoring site exceeded the nitrogen dioxide target on 136 days per year. By 2023-2024, this had dropped to 40 days per year.
For PM₂.₅, the number of days the average Defra site breached the target went from 40 to 22 days per year. While this is an improvement, the World Health Organization advises that these targets should not be breached on more than four days per year.
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To examine the sources of pollution, we studied how pollutants were influenced by factors including time of day, day of week, wind direction and origin, location of monitoring station and even interactions between pollutant. Nitrogen dioxide concentrations are highest at monitoring sites located next to busy urban roads, lower at urban background sites (which are located at sites further from traffic such as parks) and much lower in rural sites.
Profiles over 24-hour periods show strong nitrogen dioxide peaks coinciding with the morning and evening rush hours and clear decreases at weekends. This all points to local traffic emissions being the major source. While PM₂.₅ is also higher in urban than rural locations, it exhibits more muted rush hour peaks and is more consistent between the week and weekend, suggesting traffic plays a smaller role.
We explored how wind direction and origin influenced nitrogen dioxide and PM₂.₅ by running a weather forecast model backwards for three UK locations: Reading, Sheffield and Glasgow. While nitrogen dioxide showed only a weak correlation with wind origin, PM₂.₅ was much more dependent.
For example, the probability of PM₂.₅ breaching air quality targets on a given day exceeded 15% only when the air had come from continental Europe and, for Sheffield and Glasgow, passed over much of the UK too.
NO₂ and PM₂.₅ pollution reduced over the last decade but remains too high while O₃ pollution has worsened. James Weber, CC BY
While nitrogen dioxide and PM₂.₅ showed clear improvements, ozone exhibited a less positive picture. Ozone increased in 115 of the 121 sites considered, growing by 17% on average. A similar trend was observed across much of northern Europe. The average number of days ozone exceeded the World Health Organization target doubled from seven to 14 per year.
This may seem modest at present, but several factors are conspiring to drive ozone higher. In much of the UK, the relatively high levels of nitrogen dioxide effectively suppress ozone: as a result, ozone is higher in rural rather than urban areas and, as nitrogen dioxide decreases, ozone will increase further.
Unless, that is, we also target nitrogen dioxide’s partner in crime, volatile organic compounds (VOCs). VOCs are critical to the production of ozone and are emitted from human sources such as traffic and industry, plus certain types of vegetation like oak trees. While emissions of nitrogen dioxide fell by 20% between 2015-2024, human-driven VOC emissions declined by only 1%.
Ozone also increases in periods of hot weather due to elevated VOC emissions from vegetation and greater mixing of air from higher up in the atmosphere into the layer closest to the surface. Incidents of hot weather are only going to become more frequent in the UK, making it even more critical to crack down on human-driven VOC emissions to limit ozone pollution.
Up in the air
In the UK, considerable efforts have been made to improve air quality. Its importance has been enshrined in law for nearly 70 years. An extensive network of air quality monitoring sites is maintained by the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) plus devolved and local authorities.
Local authorities are required to monitor air quality and develop air quality management areas in places where targets are unlikely to be met. Clean air or low emission zones have been introduced as a result.
However, air quality policy must be designed to reflect the complex nature of each pollutants’ drivers. Nitrogen dioxide is dominated by local sources, PM₂.₅ by transport from further afield and ozone by a combination of both.
Local and national policies that cut traffic emissions by incentivising the replacement of older cars with newer, cleaner vehicles, retrofitting buses and restricting entry of the most polluting vehicles into towns and cities will probably reduce nitrogen dioxide further.
But, if nitrogen dioxide decreases are not accompanied by reductions to VOC emissions, locally and internationally, ozone will continue to rise, especially with more frequent hot weather.
By contrast, most PM₂.₅ comes from sources further afield, including industry and agriculture from other parts of the UK and beyond, so reductions hinge on stronger national and global policies that target emissions at source rather than just local efforts.
Air pollution doesn’t respect borders and while the technologies to facilitate continued improvements exist, they must be deployed in joined-up, international efforts.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
James Weber does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Il ne fait plus guère de doute aujourd’hui qu’un usage immodéré et non encadré des écrans a des effets délétères sur le développement des jeunes enfants. Toutefois, les conséquences de l’exposition aux smartphones, tablettes et autres télévisions ne dépendent pas seulement du temps passé devant, mais aussi du contexte d’utilisation et du contenu consulté.
Les écrans occupent désormais une place prépondérante dans nos modes de vie. Ces dernières années, le débat sur les conséquences de l’exposition des tout-petits à leur influence s’est intensifié, tant dans les communautés éducatives et thérapeutiques qu’au sein des familles.
Que sait-on de l’impact réel du temps d’écran sur le développement neuropsychologique des plus jeunes ? Nombre de sociétés savantes et d’associations spécialisées en pédiatrie recommandent de limiter l’usage des écrans durant l’enfance, en particulier chez les moins de 5 ans. Cependant, les recherches révèlent une réalité moins binaire que ce que l’on pourrait imaginer.
En effet, tant le contexte d’utilisation que le contenu consulté conditionnent les effets sur le développement que peut avoir le temps passé devant un écran. Faisons le point.
Des conséquences physiologiques et neuropsychologiques
En outre, la technologie ne peut ni ne doit se substituer aux jeux, à l’activité physique, au contact avec la nature ou aux interactions avec ses semblables, bref aux stimulations auxquelles sont soumis les enfants au sein de leur environnement.
Au-delà de ces effets, les inquiétudes concernent aussi les répercussions sur des fonctions telles que l’attention, le langage ou le contrôle émotionnel.
Une revue de littérature portant sur 102 études menées sur des enfants de moins de 3 ans révèle qu’il importe non seulement de surveiller le temps d’écran, mais surtout la façon dont celui-ci est utilisé, et dans quelles conditions. Ainsi, la présence d’un adulte qui commente ou interagit avec le contenu favorise l’apprentissage et l’attention. En revanche, une exposition passive ou non encadrée constitue un risque pour le développement cognitif de l’enfant.
En définitive, il ressort de ces observations que tablettes, téléphones et autres télévisions peuvent devenir des outils d’apprentissage, à condition d’être employés dans un but éducatif et sous supervision. Autrement, ils risquent de restreindre les interactions sociales, si indispensables au cerveau en développement.
Le véritable enjeu : l’âge et les contenus inappropriés
On pourrait donc affirmer que le principal risque n’est pas dû à l’écran en tant que tel, mais à ce qu’il diffuse. L’exposition précoce à un contenu inadapté est associée à des difficultés d’attention et à de moins bonnes performances des fonctions exécutives, en particulier en ce qui concerne le contrôle inhibiteur (essentiel à la régulation du comportement et de la cognition), ainsi qu’à des retards de langage.
Certes, les études n’établissent pas de liens de causalité directs avec l’exposition aux écrans. Elles révèlent néanmoins que des niveaux élevés de consommation non sélective de télévision, d’ordinateur, de téléphone ou de tablette chez les très jeunes enfants (3 ans environ) s’accompagnent non seulement d’un moindre contrôle inhibiteur, mais aussi d’une moindre activation cérébrale dans les zones concernées (le cortex préfrontal).
La simple consultation passive de plateformes de vidéos telles que YouTube peut elle aussi nuire aux tout-petits. Les enfants de 2 à 3 ans qui y ont été les plus exposés manifestent un moindre développement linguistique, un effet attribué à la réduction de leurs interactions sociales.
Enfin, l’utilisation de vidéos et de médias numériques, dans un contexte d’interactions familiales, a permis d’améliorer le développement linguistique chez des enfants de 2 ans à 4 ans présentant un retard de langage.
La solution : technologie, mouvement et interactions sociales ?
Malgré les bénéfices mentionnés précédemment, il faut garder à l’esprit que les écrans ne sauraient remplacer les activités ludiques non dirigées, l’activité physique et les interactions sociales.
Cela étant dit, une récente revue de littérature consacrée à la tranche d’âge 4-12 ans a conclu que la technologie peut jouer un rôle positif lorsqu’elle est utilisée dans le bon contexte, en étant orientée vers des jeux qui engagent l’activité physique et les relations avec les autres.
Il peut s’agir par exemple de recourir à des « objets intelligents », tels qu’un ballon enregistrant les tirs réussis ou une balançoire dotée de capteurs distribuant des récompenses virtuelles, ou de mettre en place des « jeux pervasifs », autrement dit des jeux qui, en recourant à de nouvelles technologies (GPS, réalité augmentée, etc.), créent une expérience ludique combinant des éléments appartenant aux deux mondes, réel et virtuel.
En définitive, la technologie peut constituer un levier pour inciter les enfants à bouger, à explorer et à socialiser, à condition d’être employée dans une perspective pédagogique.
Les recommandations des experts
À la lumière des atouts et des limites des écrans en matière de développement des enfants, voici divers collèges d’experts ont formulé des recommandations.
L’Académie américaine de pédiatrie recommande d’éviter les écrans chez les moins de 18 mois (à l’exception des appels vidéo). Pour les 18-24 mois, seuls les contenus de qualité, toujours consultés en compagnie d’un adulte, sont préconisés. Entre 2 ans et 5 ans, une heure quotidienne d’écrans maximum, et avec des contenus éducatifs. Elle préconise enfin d’éviter les écrans avant le coucher, de les utiliser comme outils pédagogiques – non comme simples distractions – et recommande aux adultes de donner l’exemple, en veillant à avoir eux-mêmes une utilisation saine des technologies numériques.
L’Organisation mondiale de la santé conseille quant à elle de limiter le temps d’écrans à une heure par jour pour les 2-4 ans, et à deux heures par jour pour les 5-17 ans.
Affirmer que les écrans sont « néfastes » par eux-mêmes serait aussi étrange que de considérer que le papier est dangereux, car il peut servir à imprimer n’importe quel type de livres, y compris des ouvrages peu recommandables. Ce qui compte, ce n’est pas le support, mais le contenu, le contexte et la qualité de l’interaction avec le média.
Le défi à relever en ce qui concerne les écrans consiste à trouver l’équilibre, à respecter les étapes de développement des enfants, et à parvenir à faire de la technologie une alliée – non un substitut aux jeux, aux interactions et aux expérimentations dans le monde physique.
Teresa Rossignoli Palomeque ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
Source: The Conversation – in French – By Paula Cordova Alegre, Personal docente – investigador en los grados de fisioterapia y enfermería de la Universidad San Jorge, Universidad San Jorge
Les adolescents qui pratiquent un sport régulièrement sont moins sujets aux troubles de santé mentale que ceux qui sont sédentaires.BAZA Production/Shutterstock
Pensées suicidaires, addictions, troubles alimentaires, anxieux ou dépressifs… en matière de santé mentale, l’adolescence est une période à risque. Une tendance encore aggravée par certains facteurs socio-économiques et par une actualité anxiogène. Pour lutter contre leur apparition à la puberté, l’activité physique peut avoir un rôle à jouer.
L’adolescence est une période essentielle et déterminante de notre développement. Durant cette phase, les adolescents traversent de nombreux bouleversements qui affectent non seulement leur corps et leurs émotions, mais aussi leurs relations sociales.
Cette étape de construction identitaire peut s’avérer particulièrement éprouvante, en raison notamment de l’exposition accrue aux pressions extérieures auxquelles sont exposés les jeunes en quête d’autonomie. En l’absence de ressources adaptées, les adolescents peuvent être victimes d’un déséquilibre émotionnel qui accroît le risque de troubles mentaux.
Selon l’Organisation mondiale de la santé (OMS), un jeune de 10 à 19 ans sur sept souffre de tels troubles, soit 15 % des 1 300 millions d’adolescents qui vivent aujourd’hui sur notre planète. Ce qui représente environ un sixième de la population mondiale… Au sein de ce groupe d’âge, les troubles mentaux figurent parmi les principales causes de maladie et d’invalidité.
Adopter une bonne hygiène de vie pour se protéger des troubles mentaux
La dépression et l’anxiété semblent être les affections les plus répandues chez les adolescents. Ces deux troubles partagent certains symptômes et, dans bien des cas, se traitent selon des approches similaires. Psychothérapies et traitements pharmacologiques se sont révélés des outils efficaces pour les prendre en charge.
Pour prévenir leur survenue, les habitudes de vie jouent un rôle déterminant. Les recommandations en matière de santé mentale insistent notamment sur le fait d’éviter de consommer alcool, tabac et autres drogues. Cultiver un environnement social sain et pratiquer une activité physique régulière font également partie des conseils à suivre. L’Organisation mondiale de la santé et d’autres instances internationales soulignent régulièrement les effets bénéfiques de l’exercice, qui permet de renforcer le bien-être physique, psychologique et social.
Néanmoins, ces préconisations sont ignorées par une grande partie de la population mondiale, et notamment par les plus jeunes. Entre 2016 et 2022, plus de 80 % des jeunes de 11 à 17 ans n’ont pas atteint l’objectif des soixantes minutes quotidiennes d’activité physique modérée à soutenue.
Au cours de l’adolescence, nombre de comportements évoluent. On constate notamment que la pratique du sport et de l’activité physique par les élèves diminue nettement lorsqu’ils passent dans l’enseignement secondaire.
Bouger régulièrement ne fortifie pas seulement le corps : cela protège également l’esprit. On estime que chez les adolescents actifs, le risque de présenter des symptômes dépressifs est réduit de 20 % à 30 % par rapport à celui encouru par leurs homologues sédentaires.
2. Plus le niveau d’activité physique et de performance est élevé, moins les symptômes sont marqués
L’effet bénéfique du sport sur la santé mentale dépend non seulement de sa pratique, mais aussi de son intensité et de la façon de le pratiquer. Les adolescents inactifs ont jusqu’à quatre fois plus de risques de souffrir de symptômes dépressifs modérés que des sportifs de haut niveau. Les jeunes qui s’entraînent plusieurs heures par semaine et qui participent à des compétitions, notamment nationales ou internationales, affichent un meilleur état d’esprit et présentent des niveaux d’anxiété réduits. Si le type de sport importe peu, l’engagement et la régularité s’avèrent déterminants.
Plus le mode de vie sportif d’un adolescent est structuré et motivant, plus les retombées positives sur sa santé mentale sont importantes, surtout lorsque le sport fait partie intégrante de son quotidien.
3. Les adolescentes en souffrent davantage
Les filles tendent à présenter plus de symptômes d’anxiété et de dépression que les garçons, particulièrement à mesure qu’elles avancent dans l’adolescence et la puberté.
Cet écart se creuse à partir de 14–15 ans. Selon certaines études, les adolescentes ont un risque de manifester des symptômes dépressifs 50 % à 70 % plus élevé que leurs homologues masculins.
Les causes de cette situation plongent leurs racines dans les changements hormonaux, sociaux et culturels qui surviennent à cette période. Les fluctuations d’œstrogènes, la pression esthétique accrue, la comparaison sur les réseaux sociaux, le harcèlement scolaire et une moindre perception des compétences physiques renforcent cette vulnérabilité émotionnelle.
On observe également que les adolescentes ont tendance à s’enfermer dans des pensées négatives, répétant indéfiniment leurs préoccupations dans un mode de pensée dit « de rumination », ce qui peut exacerber les symptômes anxieux et dépressifs.
Il est donc primordial d’encourager la pratique sportive chez les adolescentes, afin qu’elles se sentent en confiance, soutenues et motivées au sein d’environnements positifs et bienveillants.
4. Des bénéfices durables
Enfin, au-delà des effets immédiats, une revue de littérature récente suggère que les filles et les garçons pratiquant des activités physiques en loisir durant l’enfance et l’adolescence pourraient bénéficier, sur le long terme, d’avantages comportementaux et sanitaires.
Au regard de ces éléments, les autorités, les entraîneurs, les proches des adolescents et les jeunes eux-mêmes devraient prendre conscience des bénéfices qu’ils peuvent tirer de la pratique régulière d’une activité physique soutenue. Promouvoir le sport, qui protège et améliore tant le corps que l’esprit, est indispensable pour se forger une jeunesse plus saine et équilibrée, clé d’un futur à l’identique.
Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur organisme de recherche.
Il y a dix ans, le monde s’est engagé à maintenir le réchauffement climatique bien en dessous de 2 °C (et si possible à moins de 1,5 °C) par rapport à l’ère préindustrielle. Pour y parvenir, les pays devaient réduire considérablement les émissions de gaz à effet de serre d’ici 2030 et mettre fin à toutes les émissions de gaz à effet de serre d’origine humaine d’ici 2050. C’est à ce moment-là que 195 pays ont signé l’Accord de Paris, le traité mondial juridiquement contraignant sur le climat.
Dix ans plus tard, cependant, la crise climatique est plus urgente que jamais. Selon les Nations unies :
La première période de 12 mois a dépassé en moyenne 1,5 °C. Cette période s’étendait de février 2023 à janvier 2024, à cause du phénomène El Niño. Pendant cette période, la température moyenne mondiale était estimée à 1,52 °C au-dessus du niveau entre 1850 et 1900.
Il existe un décalage entre les politiques annoncées et les pratiques réelles, et nous avons voulu en comprendre les raisons.
Nous sommes des chercheurs en médias et communication spécialisés dans la communication environnementale. Récemment, nous avons rejoint une équipe de 14 chercheurs qui ont enquêté sur la désinformation relative au changement climatique pour le Panel international sur l’environnement informentionnel.
Notre équipe a réalisé l’étude la plus complète à ce jour sur la recherche scientifique relative à la mésinformation et la désinformation en matière de climat. La mésinformation climatique consiste à faire des déclarations erronées sur le changement climatique et à diffuser des informations incorrectes. La désinformation climatique consiste à diffuser délibérément de fausses informations. Par exemple certaines entreprises font du “greenwashing” (écoblanchiment, verdissage): elles prétendent à tort que leurs produits sont écologiques pour mieux les vendre.
Nous avons examiné 300 études publiées entre 2015 et 2025, toutes axées sur la désinformation climatique. Notre étude montre que la réponse humaine à la crise climatique est entravée et retardée par la production et la diffusion d’informations trompeuses.
Nous avons identifié les principaux responsables : des acteurs puissants, notamment les compagnies pétrolières, des partis populistes, ou même certains États.
Pourtant, les citoyens ont besoin d’informations fiables sur le climat.
C’est indispensable pour pouvoir agir et limiter le réchauffement.
Sans une information juste, nous ne pourrons pas faire les bons choix, ni pour notre avenir, ni pour la planète.
Comment nous avons identifié ceux qui manipulent l’opinion
Depuis des décennies, la science du climat documente l’aggravation de la crise climatique et les solutions pour y remédier. Les Nations unies affirment que l’accès à l’information sur le changement climatique est un droit humain. Elle a même défini un ensemble de principes mondiaux visant à garantir l’intégrité des informations accessibles au public sur le changement climatique.
Pourtant, notre étude montre que des informations trompeuses aggravent la crise climatique.
Notre étude s’est penchée sur cinq questions simples : qui dit quoi, sur quel canal, à qui et avec quels effets ?
Voici ce que nous avons découvert :
Qui ? : Les principaux responsables de la désinformation sur le climat sont de puissants acteurs économiques et politiques. Il s’agit des entreprises du secteur des énergies fossiles, des partis politiques, des gouvernements et certains États. Ils forment des alliances opaques, sans contrôle public, avec des think tanks bien financés, comme The Heartland Institute aux États-Unis, qui conteste activement la science du climat.
Quoi? : Le déni de la réalité du changement climatique est remplacé par un scepticisme stratégique. Celui-ci tente de minimiser la gravité du changement climatique en prétendant que ses conséquences pour l’humanité ne sont pas si graves. Il en résulte un retard dans la mise en œuvre des mesures d’atténuation du changement climatique visant à limiter les émissions de carbone des pays. Les efforts d’adaptation, en particulier la préparation aux phénomènes météorologiques extrêmes, sont insuffisants. Pire encore, les solutions scientifiques éprouvées depuis des décennies par la science du climat sont remises en question.
Par quel canal? : Les médias traditionnels (journaux, chaînes de télévision) et les réseaux sociaux diffusent des informations fausses et trompeuses sur le changement climatique. Les rapports sur la durabilité des entreprises constituent un autre vecteur de communication tout aussi important. En effet, ces documents sont souvent utilisés pour faire du greenwashing en présentant des entreprises sous un jour favorable, alors qu’elles sont conscientes de leur impact sur le climat mais choisissent de le cacher.
À qui? : Tout le monde est visé par la désinformation. Mais les élus, les fonctionnaires et les autres décideurs sont des cibles privilégiées, car ils sont des maillons essentiels de la chaîne de communication qui influencent les décisions et les actions.
Par exemple, des think tanks transmettent leurs notes à des cadres intermédiaires, qui relayent ensuite des conseils biaisés aux responsables politiques.
Avec quels effets? : Cette désinformation fausse les perceptions du public et influence les politiques publiques. Les théories du complot, en particulier, sapent la confiance envers la science du climat et les institutions chargées de la traduire en décisions. Il en résulte une inaction et une aggravation de la crise climatique.
Ce qu’il faut faire maintenant
Pour être positive, notre étude a identifié plusieurs leviers d’action pour améliorer la compréhension du public et renforcer la réponse politique face au changement climatique.
1) Législation : des lois sont nécessaires pour garantir que des informations précises, cohérentes, fiables et transparentes sur le changement climatique soient mises à la disposition du public et des décideurs politiques. Par exemple, les entreprises privées et les institutions publiques devraient être tenues par la loi de rendre compte de leur empreinte carbone de manière standardisée. Les plateformes numériques et les médias devraient aussi être tenus de signaler clairement les contenus trompeurs sur le climat diffusés en ligne.
2) Poursuites judiciaires : celles-ci doivent être engagées contre les entreprises qui se livrent à du greenwashing et à d’autres pratiques trompeuses. Par exemple, des poursuites ont été engagées pour désinformation dans le cadre de fraudes à la consommation.
3) Coalitions de volontaires : des mouvements doivent être créés au-delà des frontières et entre les secteurs privé, public et civil. Celles-ci peuvent contrebalancer les alliances entre les puissants intérêts économiques et politiques. Le groupe mondial d’organisations militantes Climate Action Against Disinformation en est une illustration. Ces coalitions doivent s’appuyer sur les connaissances locales et encourager la participation des citoyens à la base
4) L’éducation doit élargir et approfondir les connaissances scientifiques et médiatiques des citoyens et des décideurs politiques. L’éducation est une source d’autonomisation et d’espoir pour l’avenir.
5) Notre étude n’a trouvé qu’une seule étude portant sur l’ensemble du continent africain. Il est urgent que des chercheurs africains mènent davantage de recherches sur la désinformation climatique en Afrique.
Le Brésil accueillera la conférence annuelle sur le changement climatique, la COP30, en novembre 2025. Le pays a lancé une Initiative mondiale pour l’intégrité de l’information sur les changement climatiques. Il s’agit d’une première étape pour combler les lacunes actuelles en matière de connaissances sur la crise mondiale de l’intégrité de l’information.
La réponse à la crise climatique et à la désinformation climatique doit venir des responsables politiques, des scientifiques et des citoyens.
Entre 2025 et 2050, nous disposons dune courte fenêtre de temps pour éviter une catastrophe mondiale pour l’humanité et la biodiversité.
Des informations climatiques précises et exploitables sont indispensables pour répondre à la crise climatique et la résoudre.
Semahat Ece Elbeyi bénéficie d’un financement du Conseil européen de la recherche et est consultante scientifique auprès du Panel international sur l’environnement informationnel.
Klaus Bruhn Jensen bénéficie d’un financement du Conseil européen de la recherche et est affilié au Panel international sur l’environnement informationnel.
A series of atrocity sites of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia have been formally entered onto the World Heritage list, as part of the 47th session of the World Heritage Committee.
This is not only important for Cambodia, but also raises important questions for atrocity sites in Australia.
Before this, the World Heritage list only recognised seven “sites of memory” associated with recent conflicts, which UNESCO defines as “events having occurred from the turn of the 20th century” under its criterion vi. These sat within a broader list of more than 950 cultural sites.
In recent years, experts have intensely debated the question of whether a site associated with recent conflict could, or should, be nominated and evaluated for World Heritage status. Some argue such listings would contradict the objectives of UNESCO and its spirit of peace, which was part of the specialised agency’s mandate after the destruction of two world wars.
Sites associated with recent conflicts can be divisive. For instance, when Japan nominated the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, both China and the United States objected and eventually disassociated from the decision. The US argued the nomination lacked “historical perspective” on the events that led to the bomb’s use. Meanwhile, China argued listing the property would not be conducive for peace as other Asian countries and peoples had suffered at the hands of the Japanese during WWII.
Heritage inscriptions risk reinforcing societal divisions if they conserve a particular memory in a one-sided way.
Nonetheless, the World Heritage Committee decided in 2023 to no longer preclude such sites for inscription. This was done partly in recognition of how these sites may “serve the peace-building mission of UNESCO”.
Shortly after, three listing were added: the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory, a former clandestine centre for detention, torture and extermination in Argentina; memorial sites of the Rwandan genocide at Nyamata, Murambi, Gisozi and Bisesero; and funerary and memory sites of the first world war in Belgium and France.
A number of legacy sites associated with Nelson Mandela’s human rights struggle in South Africa were also added last year.
Atrocities of the Khmer Rouge
The recently inscribed Cambodian Memorial Sites include prisons S-21 (now known as Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum) and M-13, as well as the execution site Choeung Ek.
These sites were nominated for their value in showing the development of extreme mass violence in relation to the security system of the Khmer Rouge in 1975–79. They also have value as places of memorialisation, peace and learning.
The Khmer Rouge developed its methods of disappearance, incarceration and torture of suspected “enemies” during the civil conflict of 1970–75. It established a system of local-level security centres in so-called “liberated” areas.
One of these centres was known as M-13, a small, well-hidden prison in the country’s rural southwest. A man named Kaing Guek Eav – also called Duch – was responsible for prisoners at M-13.
Shortly after the entire country fell to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975, Duch was assigned to lead the headquarters of the regime’s security system: a large detention and torture centre known as S-21.
Under his instruction, tens of thousands of people were detained in inhumane conditions, tortured and interrogated. Many detainees were later taken to the outskirts of the city to be brutally killed and buried in pits at a place called Choeung Ek.
The sites operated until early 1979, when the Khmer Rouge was forced from power.
The S-21 facility and the mass graves at Choeung Ek have long been memorialised as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre.
However, the former M-13 site shows few visual clues to its prior use, and has only recently been investigated by an international team led by Cambodian archaeologist and museum director Hang Nisay. The site is on an island in a small river that forms the boundary between the Kampong Chhnang and Kampong Speu provinces.
Further research, site protection and memorialisation activities will now be supported, with help from locals.
From repression to reflection
The Cambodian memorial sites have been recognised as holding “outstanding universal value” for the way they evidence one of the 20th century’s worst atrocities, and are now places of memory.
In its nomination dossier for these sites, Cambodia drew on findings from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal to verify and link the conflict and the sites.
In 2010, the tribunal found Duch guilty of crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Duch was sentenced to 30 years in prison (which eventually turned into life imprisonment). He died in 2020.
While courts such as the International Criminal Court have previously examined the destruction of heritage as an international crime, drawing on legal findings to assert heritage status is an unusual inverse. It raises important questions about the legacies of former UN-supported tribunals and the ongoing implications of their findings.
The recent listings also raise questions for Australia, which has many sites of documented mass killing associated with colonisation and the frontier wars that lasted into the 20th century.
Might Australia nominate any of these atrocity sites in the future? And could other processes such as truth-telling, reparation and redress support (or be supported by) such nominations?
Rachel Hughes has consulted to UNESCO Cambodia.
Maria Elander does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Long before pesticides reach lethal doses, they can disrupt hormones, impair brain function and change fish behaviour. Many of these behaviours are essential for healthy ecosystems.
In a new study, my colleagues and I found that pesticides affect many different behaviours in fish. Overall, the chemical pesticides make fish less sociable and interactive. They spend less time gathering in groups, become less protective of their territory, and make fewer attempts to mate.
Imagine the ocean without the vibrant schools of fish we’ve come to love – only isolated swimmers drifting about. Quietly, ecosystems begin to unravel, long before mass die-offs hit the news.
Australia is a major producer and user of pesticides, with more than 11,000 approved chemical products routinely used in agricultural and domestic settings. Remarkably, some of these chemicals remain approved in Australia despite being banned in other regions such as the European Union due to safety concerns.
When a tractor or plane sprays pesticides onto crops, it creates a mist of chemicals in the air to kill crop pests. After heavy rain, these chemicals can flow into roadside drains, filter through soil, and slowly move into rivers, lakes and oceans.
Fish swim in this diluted chemical mixture. They can absorb pesticides through their gills or eat contaminated prey.
At high concentrations, mass fish deaths can result, such as those repeatedly observed in the Menindee Lakes. However, doses in the wild often aren’t lethal and more subtle effects can occur. Scientists call these “sub-lethal” effects.
One commonly investigated sub-lethal effect is a change in behaviour – in other words, a change in the way a fish interacts with its surrounding environment.
Our previous research has found most experiments have looked at the impacts on fish in isolation, measuring things such as how far or how fast they swim when pesticides are present.
But fish aren’t solitary — they form groups, defend territory and find mates. These behaviours keep aquatic ecosystems stable. So this time we studied how pesticides affect these crucial social behaviours.
Pesticide exposure makes fish less social
Our study extracted and analysed data from 37 experiments conducted around the world. Together, these tested the impacts of 31 different pesticides on the social behaviour of 11 different fish species.
The evidence suggests pesticides make fish less social, and this finding is consistent across species. Courtship was the most severely impacted behaviour – the process fish use to find and attract mates. This is particularly alarming because successful courtship is essential for healthy fish populations and ecosystem stability.
Next, we found pesticides such as the herbicide glyphosate, which can disrupt brain function and hormone levels had the strongest impacts on fish social behaviours. This raises important questions about how brain function and hormones drive fish social behaviour, which could be tested by scientists in the future.
For example, scientists could test how much a change in testosterone relates to a change in territory defence. Looking at these relationships between what’s going on inside the body mechanisms and outward behaviour will help us better understand the complex impacts of pesticides.
We also identified gaps in the current studies. Most existing studies focus on a limited number of easy-to-study “model species” such as zebrafish, medaka and guppies. They also often use pesticide dosages and durations that may not reflect real-world realities.
Addressing these gaps by including a range of species and environmentally relevant dosages is crucial to understanding how pesticides affect fish in the wild.
One of the experiments in our study involved convict surgeonfish, which gather in large groups or ‘shoals’. Damsea, Shutterstock
Behaviour is a blind spot in regulation
Regulatory authorities should begin to recognise behaviour as a reliable and important indicator of pesticide safety. This can help them catch pesticide pollution early, before mass deaths occur.
Scientists play a crucial role too. By following the same methods, scientists can produce comparable results. A standardised method then provides regulators the evidence needed to confidently assess pesticide risks.
Together, regulatory authorities and scientists can find a way to use behavioural studies to help inform policy decisions. This will help to prevent mass deaths and catch pesticide impacts early on.
Leave no stone unturned in restoring our waters
Rivers, lakes, oceans and reefs are bearing the brunt of an ever-growing human footprint.
So far, much of the spotlight has focused on reducing carbon emissions and managing overfishing — and rightly so. But there’s another, quieter threat drifting beneath the surface: the chemicals we use.
Pesticides used on farms and in gardens are being detected everywhere, even iconic ecosystems such as the Great Barrier Reef. As we have shown, these pesticides can have disturbing effects even at low concentrations.
Now is the time to cut pesticide use and reduce runoff. Through switching to less toxic chemicals and introducing better regulations, we can reduce the damage. If we act with urgency, we can limit the impacts pesticides have on our planet.
Kyle Morrison does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
“Imagine her tenderly pressing her soft lips against yours”, writes one incel on Reddit, before concluding, “you will never get to experience this because your skeleton is too small or the bones in your face are not the right shape”.
In his debut book, The Male Complaint, Simon Copland escorts his readers through the manosphere and into the minds of its inhabitants. He illustrates how boys and men who are “terrifyingly normal” become attracted to the manosphere’s grim logic – and the cognitive distortions of anti-feminist influencers like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson.
While mainstream debates often cite toxic masculinity as the cause of online misogyny, Copland, a writer and researcher at the Australian National University, shifts the blame to a deeper cultural malaise. It’s caused, he argues, by the cruel optimism of the manosphere, the multiple social and economic crises of late-stage capitalism and a collective nihilistic misery in which complaint becomes futile and destruction “the only way out”.
Review: The Male Complaint – Simon Copland (Polity)
The manosphere is a network of loosely related blogs and forums devoted to “men’s interests” – sites like The Rational Male, Game Global and the subreddits ForeverAlone, TheRedPill and MensRights. These online communities, separate in their specific beliefs, are united by their misogynistic ideas – and anti-women and anti-diversity sentiments.
They’re also united by the growing tendency of the men in these communities towards nihilistic violence: not only against others, but also against themselves.
In The Male Complaint, Copland relays his dismay at discovering “a constant stream” of suicide notes on Reddit, including a subreddit, IncelGraveyard, which catalogues close to 100 suicide notes and letters posted by self-identified incels.
Since I was a kid I was fed up with ‘Don’t worry, it will get better’, ‘You will find someone’ […] it’s not even that I want a SO (significant other) anymore. Women are awful. People are awful. I have no friends.
For Copland, the violence incels inflict on themselves is a form of passive nihilism. Incels “don’t just express disgust and despair at the world, but in themselves – their looks, body, lives, personality, intelligence, and more”.
Who’s in the manosphere?
The manosphere includes men’s rights activists, pick-up artists and “Men Going Their Own Way” (male separatists who avoid contact with women altogether). And of course, incels: men who believe they are unable to find a romantic or sexual partner due to their perceived genetic inferiority and oppression.
Incels also blame their problems on women’s alleged hypergamy: the theory women seek out partners of higher social or economic status and therefore marry “up”. Put another way, hypergamy, a concept rooted in evolutionary psychology, is the belief “women are hard-wired to be gold diggers”.
Rollo Tomassi, the so-called “godfather of the manosphere”, complains on his blog that “women love opportunistically”, while “men believe that love matters for the sake of it”.
According to Tomassi, the “cruel reality” of modern dating is that men are romantics who are “forced to be realists”, while women are realists whose use “romanticisms to effect their imperatives”. Tomassi complains:
Our girlfriends, our wives, daughters and even our mothers are all incapable of idealized love […] By order of degrees, hypergamy will define who a woman loves and who she will not, depending upon her own opportunities and capacity to attract it.
Ten years ago, these communities were largely regarded as fringe groups. Today, their ideology has infiltrated the mainstream.
On Sunday, ABC TV’s Compass reported that misogyny is on the rise in Australian classrooms, with female teachers sharing their experiences of sexual assault and harassment on school grounds – ranging from boys writing stories about gang raping their teachers to masturbating “over them” in the bathrooms. One student even pretended to stab his pregnant teacher as a “joke”.
A 2025 report published by UN Women shows 53% of women have experienced some form of technology-facilitated, gender-based violence. The dark side of digitalisation disproportionately affects young women aged between 18 and 24, LGBTQI+ women, women who are divorced or who live in the city, and women who participate in online gaming.
‘Biologically bad’?
Copland argues that simplified critiques of toxic masculinity minimise the problem of male violence. They fail to consider the context and history of gendered behaviour, assuming toxic traits are somehow innate and unique to men, rather than the product of social expectations and relations.
This, in turn, promotes the idea that male violence derives from something “biologically bad” in the nature of masculinity itself. As Copland explains, “this is embedded in the term ‘toxic’, which makes it sound like men’s bodies have become diseased or infected”.
Blaming toxic masculinity for digital misogyny also embraces a form of smug politics in which disaffected men are dismissed as degenerates who are fundamentally different to “us” (meaning the activist left and leftist elites). They are “cellar dwellers”, “subhuman freaks”, or “virgin losers” who need to be either enlightened or locked up. “We”, on the other hand, are educated, progressive, superior.
This kind of rhetoric, as Copland explains, is unhelpful. It does not create the conditions for changing the opinions, narratives and futures of manosphere men because it does not allow people to understand their complaints and where those concerns come from – even if we do not agree with them.
Belittling attitudes and demeaning discourses alienate men who already feel socially isolated. This pushes those men further to the fringes – into the hands of “manfluencers” who claim to understand.
‘Not having love becomes everything’
The manosphere, Copland observes, is not “an aberration that is different and distinct from the rest of the world”, nor is it a community that exists solely on the “dark corners of the web”.
Rather, the manosphere, as an echo chamber, enables and encourages what Copland calls “the male complaint”: a sense of collective pain or “injury” so intrinsic to the group’s identity, it cannot be redressed.
As injured subjects who believe their problems are caused through no fault of their own, manosphere men cannot mend the “wound” they believe society has inflicted upon them. Their “marginalisation” and injured status are the lens through which they view themselves and the world.
In the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) community, for example, some men talk about the movement as a hospital where “physicians of the male soul” use different “methods of healing” to treat the “illness of gynocentric-induced disease weighing them down”. These methods include “self-improvement” strategies that are designed to build men’s power and wealth: purchasing gym equipment, investing in the stock market, even abstaining from pornography and sex.
Others in the MGTOW community are vocally anti-victim: “You can live an extraordinary life,” one man says to another, “but you’re wasting your time on complaints and negativity”.
Even when they disagree, though, manosphere men frame women and feminism as the enemy. In this way, the machinery of the manosphere capitalises on men’s discontent, reflects that messaging back to them and displaces their anger and hurt onto an easy scapegoat.
As Copland observes, it is easier for men to blame women for their unhappiness than it is to blame the complex systems of capitalism: “if love and sex is everything, then not having love becomes everything as well”.
Blackpilled incels, lookism and anonymity
This preoccupation with intimacy is central to the incel community. It is exemplified by the various artefacts Copland embeds in his book – memes and posts from the manosphere itself.
Blackpilled incels are a subgroup of incels who believe their access to romantic and sexual relationships is doomed because of “lookism”: the belief women choose sexual partners based solely on their physical features.
Blackpilled ideology attributes romantic failure to genetically unalterable aspects of the human body, such as one’s height or skull shape. Some blackpilled incels, who call themselves wristcels, even blame their lack of sexual success on the width of their wrists.
This logic is countered by research that demonstrates men, in fact, show stronger preferences for physical attractiveness than women, with women tending to prioritise education level and earning potential.
On Reddit, incels often imagine and bitterly dismiss the potential for love and intimacy because of their looks. Ohsineon/Pexels
The manosphere, however, amplifies this type of thinking and filters out information that challenges these ideas and opinions, increasing group polarisation. Despite its promise of solidarity, the manosphere isolates boys and men, and ultimately distances them from their wider community. This segregation results in a deep sense of alienation – these boys and men become stuck in a perpetual cycle of ideological reinforcement.
The manosphere thrives on anonymity, writes Copland, which only reinforces the idea it is not designed to foster deep relationships or connections.
No silver bullets
The sense of community the manosphere claims to offer is a sham; its alienating structures do not offer boys and men genuine belonging and connection, or real solutions to their problems.
“From one day to the next, the ability to communicate depends on the whims of hidden engineers,” writes media studies professor Mark Andrejevic of online networks more broadly. The manosphere, like other virtual constructs, is subject to manipulation by those who control the infrastructure and the rules of engagement.
More than this, the manosphere does not provide an alternative to complaint. When complaint is the only option, writes Copland, nihilism and violence are the inevitable result.
When nothing matters, there are no consequences to anything, including violence […] Manosphere men do not look to convince others, but rather seek their destruction. Destruction is the outlet they find to deal with their complaint.
That’s what makes the manosphere so dangerous.
‘Popular boys must be punished’
In 2014, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger, a British-American college student, embarked on an hours-long stabbing and shooting spree in the university town of Isla Vista, California, killing six and injuring 14. On the morning of May 23 – the “Day of Retribution” – Rodger emailed a 140-page “manifesto” to his family, friends and therapists. He also uploaded several YouTube videos in which he lamented his inability to find a girlfriend, the “hedonistic pleasures” of his peers and his painful existence of “loneliness, rejection, and unfilled desires”.
In his memoir-manifesto, Rodger – the supposed “patron saint of inceldom” – explains the motive for his violence:
I had nothing left to live for but revenge. Women must be punished for their crimes of rejecting such a magnificent gentleman as myself. All of those popular boys must be punished for enjoying heavenly lives and having sex with all the girls while I had to suffer in lonely virginity.
Four years later, in April 2018, Alek Minassian, a self-described incel, drove a rented van onto a busy sidewalk in Toronto, killing 11 (nine of them women) and injuring many more. On Facebook, Minassian explained that his actions were part of the “incel rebellion” led by the “Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger”. Later, Minassian told police, “I feel like I accomplished my mission”.
Rodger, too, ended his final YouTube video with a similar message: “If I can’t have you girls, I will destroy you”.
In his book, Copland even draws a parallel between the Westfield Bondi Junction attack and the explanation for attacker Joel Cauchi’s violence, put forward by his father just two days after the attack: “To you, he is a monster. To me, he was a very sick boy […] he wanted a girlfriend and he’s got no social skills and he was frustrated out of his brain”.
In fact, Cauchi suffered from treatment-resistant schizophrenia and had been unmedicated at the time of the attack: “after almost two decades of treatment, Cauchi had no regular psychiatrist, was not on any medications to treat his schizophrenia and had no family living nearby”. The multifaceted causes of Cauchi’s crime are more complex than misogynistic violence.
Indeed, the pieces of the manosphere puzzle, when put together, reveal a sobering image of the male complaint. However, they demonstrate misogyny is bad for everyone – not just women and girls.
As Copland concludes:
The manosphere promises men that it can make their lives better […] But it really cannot deliver. The promises it offers are not real, and in many cases make things worse […] This is how cruel optimism works, always offering, but never delivering.
‘It’s the combinations’
Recent evidence suggests there is no single route to radicalisation, and no single cause of violent extremism. Rather, complex interactions between push, pull, and personal factors are the root causes of male violence.
The Netflix sensation Adolescence – the harrowing story of a 13-year-old boy who is arrested and charged with murder – is powered by a single question: why did Jamie kill Katie?
In attempting to answer this question, critics and fans have offered a range of explanations: bullying, low self-esteem, emotional dysregulation, obsession with love and sex, deprivation of love and sex, the manosphere. The real answer is less obvious and infinitely more complex. It can be found in a simple line of dialogue, spoken at the end of the series by Jamie’s sister.
“It’s the combinations,” Lisa says. “Combinations are everything.”
In this moment, Lisa is justifying her outfit to her parents as they await Jamie’s trial. But subtextually, her statement doubles as the most likely explanation for his actions. And it’s the closest explanation for why some boys and men commit extreme acts of violence: the combinations.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Kate Cantrell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
It was a surrender widely foreseen. For months, rumors abounded that Paramount would eventually settle the seemingly frivolous lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump concerning editorial decisions in the production of a CBS interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in 2024.
On July 2, 2025, those rumors proved true: The settlement between Paramount and Trump’s legal team resulted in CBS’s parent company agreeing to pay $16 million to the future Donald Trump Library – the $16 million included Trump’s legal fees – in exchange for ending the lawsuit. Despite the opinion of many media law scholars and practicing attorneys who considered the lawsuit meritless, Shari Redstone, the largest shareholder of Paramount, yielded to Trump.
Specifically, when the Trump administration assumed power in January 2025, the new Federal Communications Commission had no legal obligation to facilitate, without scrutiny, the transfer of the CBS network’s broadcast licenses for its owned-and-operated TV stations to new ownership.
The FCC, under newly installed Republican Chairman Brendan Carr, was fully aware of the issues in the legal conflict between Trump and CBS at the time Paramount needed FCC approval for the license transfers. Without a settlement, the Paramount-Skydance deal remained in jeopardy.
Until it wasn’t.
At that point, Paramount joined Disney in implicitly apologizing for journalism produced by their TV news divisions.
Earlier in 2025, Disney had settled a different Trump lawsuit with ABC News in exchange for a $15 million donation to the future Trump Library. That lawsuit involved a dispute over the wording of the actions for which Trump was found liable in a civil lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll.
GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump said the CBS interview with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris was ‘fraudulent interference with an election.’
It’s not certain what the ABC and CBS settlements portend, but many are predicting they will produce a “chilling effect” within the network news divisions. Such an outcome would arise from fear of new litigation, and it would install a form of internal self-censorship that would influence network journalists when deciding whether the pursuit of investigative stories involving the Trump administration would be worth the risk.
Trump has apparently succeeded where earlier presidents failed.
Presidential pressure
From Jimmy Carter trying to get CBS anchor Walter Cronkite to stop ending his evening newscasts with the number of days American hostages were being held in Iran to Richard Nixon’s administration threatening the broadcast licenses of The Washington Post’s TV stations to weaken Watergate reporting, previous presidents sought to apply editorial pressure on broadcast journalists.
But in the cases of Carter and Nixon, it didn’t work. The broadcast networks’ focus on both Watergate and the Iran hostage crisis remained unrelenting.
Nor were Nixon and Carter the first presidents seeking to influence, and possibly control, network news.
President Lyndon Johnson, who owned local TV and radio stations in Austin, Texas, regularly complained to his old friend, CBS President Frank Stanton, about what he perceived as biased TV coverage. Johnson was so furious with the CBS and NBC reporting from Vietnam, he once argued that their newscasts seemed “controlled by the Vietcong.”
Yet none of these earlier presidents won millions from the corporations that aired ethical news reporting in the public interest.
Before Trump, these conflicts mostly occurred backstage and informally, allowing the broadcasters to sidestep the damage to their credibility should any surrender to White House administrations be made public. In a “Reporter’s Notebook” on the CBS Evening News the night of the Trump settlement, anchor John Dickerson summarized the new dilemma succinctly: “Can you hold power to account when you’ve paid it millions? Can an audience trust you when it thinks you’ve traded away that trust?”
“The audience will decide that,” Dickerson continued, concluding: “Our job is to show up to honor what we witness on behalf of the people we witness it for.”
During the Iran hostage crisis, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite ended every broadcast with the number of days the hostages had been held captive.
Soon, SkyDance Media will assume control over the Paramount properties, and the new CBS will be on the airwaves.
When the licenses for KCBS in Los Angeles, WCBS in New York and the other CBS-owned-and-operated stations are transferred, we’ll learn the long-term legacy of corporate capitulation. But for now, it remains too early to judge tomorrow’s newscasts.
As a scholar of broadcast journalism and a former broadcast journalist, I recommend evaluating programs like “60 Minutes” and the “CBS Evening News” on the record they will compile over the next three years – and the record they compiled over the past 50. The same goes for “ABC World News Tonight” and other ABC News programs.
A major complicating factor for the Paramount-Skydance deal was the fact that “60 Minutes” has, over the past six months, broken major scoops embarrassing to the Trump administration, which led to additional scrutiny by its corporate ownership. Judged by its reporting in the first half of 2025, “60 Minutes” has upheld its record of critical and independent reporting in the public interest.
If audience members want to see ethical, independent and professional broadcast journalism that holds power to account, then it’s the audience’s responsibility to tune it in. The only way to learn the consequences of these settlements is by watching future programming rather than dismissing it beforehand.
The journalists working at ABC News and CBS News understand the legacy of their organizations, and they are also aware of how their owners have cast suspicion on the news divisions’ professionalism and credibility. As Dickerson asserted, they plan to “show up” regardless of the stain, and I’d bet they’re more motivated to redeem their reputations than we expect.
I don’t think reporters, editors and producers plan to let Donald Trump become their editor-in-chief over the next three years. But we’ll only know by watching.
Michael Socolow’s father, Sanford Socolow, worked for CBS News from 1956 to 1988.
Source: The Conversation – (in Spanish) – By Maite Aurrekoetxea Casaus, Profesora Doctora en Sociología en la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas, Universidad de Deusto
Jannik Sinner, reciente campeón del Open Wimbledon 2025, lo resumía al acabar el partido: “Lo importante es estar sano”. Durante esta misma final, Carlos Alcaraz pedía abiertamente ayuda a su equipo en plena pista.
Lejos de mostrar debilidad, ambos representan una nueva forma de estar en el deporte y en el mundo. Es la voz de una generación, la Z (18 a 24 años), que desmiente el estigma de la fragilidad.
Compiten de forma distinta a las generaciones anteriores. No porque tengan menos talento, sino porque llevan otra mochila: emocional, digital, conectada.
Han crecido poniendo nombre a lo que sienten, pidiendo ayuda, sabiendo que llorar no es rendirse. No les falta dureza mental, les sobra lucidez emocional.
Necesitan disfrutar, descansar, desconectar. Y en esa necesidad están expresando algo más profundo: un cambio de paradigma en la relación entre juventud, deporte y salud mental.
La percepción creciente de malestar entre los jóvenes deportistas va más allá de las experiencias individuales. Detrás de esa incomodidad subyacen factores sociales que a menudo ignoramos: la cultura del rendimiento extremo, la presión constante por encajar y el choque de valores entre generaciones. Es en ese punto de fricción donde surge el verdadero desajuste y el deseo de cambiar las reglas del juego.
La Encuesta de Valores Europeos muestra, tanto en Europa como en España, que las tres cualidades más promovidas en el entorno familiar son tolerancia y respeto por los demás (92,6 %), sentido de la responsabilidad (82 %) y buenos modales (81,8 %).
Aunque estas cualidades puedan parecer positivas, su carácter relacional y normativo apunta a un modelo centrado en la conformidad y la adecuación a las expectativas sociales, más que en la gestión emocional o la creatividad.
Por el contrario, otras cualidades estrechamente vinculadas con la capacidad de afrontar la frustración o sostener procesos de largo recorrido aparecen relegadas: imaginación (22 %), trabajo duro (31,4 %), anticipación (2,6 %) y determinación/perseverancia (44,7 %).
Este patrón no solo ilustra una preferencia educativa, sino que configura el universo emocional que se manifiesta en toda una generación de jóvenes deportistas.
El deporte no es una burbuja
Aunque el deporte de élite pueda parecer un mundo aparte, no vive ajeno a las dinámicas culturales y sociales. Muchos jóvenes deportistas son formados para evitar mostrar debilidad y para seguir las reglas sin cuestionarlas.
Este modelo podía funcionar para otras generaciones, cuando la obediencia y la disciplina eran premiadas. Pero los jóvenes de la Generación Z, educados en otros valores, necesitan de autonomía emocional, capacidad de improvisación y fortaleza psicológica, especialmente en momentos de presión. Ahí, el modelo hace aguas.
En Alemania, más del 95 % de atletas de élite manifestaron angustia psicológica y un 28,6 % mostró síntomas depresivos, asociados a lesiones graves y precariedad económica.
Las cifras invitan a dejar de ver el malestar de los jóvenes deportistas como un simple problema individual de adaptación. Más bien apuntan a un desajuste profundo entre el modelo educativo-deportivo tradicional y las exigencias reales del alto rendimiento actual.
A ello se suma un dato clave. Esta generación no solo experimenta más malestar, sino que también tiene una mayor conciencia de su salud mental y se atreve a hablar de su deterioro.
Es importante entender que no se trata de una fragilidad mayor, sino una transición desde lo que se ha llamado la cultura del sacrificio hacia una cultura del bienestar, donde el rendimiento ya no se concibe en oposición a la salud, sino como dependiente de ella.
Estas generaciones de jóvenes han sido formadas en un contexto emocionalmente más expresivo, digitalizado e interdependiente. Lejos de tratarse de una generación débil, se trata de jóvenes capaces de nombrar su ansiedad, pedir ayuda y rechazar narrativas que niegan el malestar.
Nuevos esquemas de intervención psicológica
La transición exige revisar los esquemas de entrenamiento a quienes trabajan con estos/as deportistas. Y pensar que las expectativas puestas sobre los/as deportistas que aún operan bajo lógicas de disciplina, silencio emocional y tolerancia al sufrimiento ya no encajan con los esquemas de esta generación.
La buena noticia es que existen intervenciones respaldadas por la evidencia científica.
Las estrategias apuntan hacia una visión preventiva, integral y contextualizada del bienestar psicológico, donde el papel de entrenadores/as, compañeros/as y la propia organización deportiva es central y por supuesto el entorno familiar.
El pilar de la familia y las amistades
Esta generación configura su entorno familiar y de amistades como uno de los grandes pilares para alcanzar logros personales y deportivos. No se trata solo de intervenciones clínicas individuales, sino de repensar los entornos de práctica como espacios emocionalmente sostenibles y seguros.
Deben crearse entornos donde se valoren los siguientes aspectos:
La imaginación como herramienta táctica y emocional.
La perseverancia como proceso, no solo como resultado.
El pensamiento crítico como antídoto frente al conformismo.
La gestión emocional como una competencia clave del rendimiento.
Y esto exige, a su vez, revisar nuestras propias ideas adultas sobre el éxito, el esfuerzo y la dureza mental. Tienen difícil encaje los reproches de exjugadores/as y entrenadores/as, que cuestionan estas expresiones sin caer en la cuenta que lo hacen desde modelos que no responden a los esquemas de los jóvenes actuales.
No están pidiendo menos exigencia, sino otro tipo de acompañamiento: más coherente, más humano, más actualizado. Escucharles con atención, no solo con compasión, no es una opción ética, es una necesidad estructural.
Atender y aprender de esta nueva generación es, quizás, el mayor desafío y la mejor oportunidad para construir un deporte, y una sociedad, más saludable, humana y sostenible.
Las personas firmantes no son asalariadas, ni consultoras, ni poseen acciones, ni reciben financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y han declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado anteriormente.
