Reading the news, you would believe that the Great Barrier Reef -- the aquatic wonder off Australia's coast -- is on its deathbed, bleached beyond recognition by climate change. Recent headlines shouted in unison: "Great Barrier Reef suffers worst coral decline on record." Environmental journalists are in panic mode about irreversible damage. This is advocacy campaigning, not impartial reporting.

Since 1986, Australian scientists have measured coral cover on the reef each year, meticulously tracking variations. Up to the millennium, the reef was mostly stable, but in the early noughties it started declining, and by 2012 it had shrunk to less than half its original cover. Unsurprisingly, reporting got more pessimistic. Researchers famously predicted that climate change and warmer waters would halve the coral cover again by 2022 to almost nothing.

Then something surprising happened. The reef started improving. But the reporting didn't. The consistently climate-alarmed newspaper The Guardian penned the reef's obituary in 2014.

Over the next decade, the reef rebounded spectacularly. By 2021, coral cover was higher than it had been since measurements began. Then it increased further, staying at almost impossibly high levels in 2022 and 2023. Did the media celebrate? Hardly.

Last year saw even higher record coral coverage, but this good news was again all but ignored by the media. That brings us to 2025. The new data shows that coral cover has dropped across 10 of 11 sectors, with two experiencing their largest one-year drop. Finally, the media could again deliver end-of-times headlines, and they didn't hold back, with CNN delivering the news that the Great Barrier Reef is "devastated".

But remember: the reductions came off the record high of 2024. Large year-to-year variations are typical. One sector saw its coral cover in 2025 reach its highest level ever. The data shows coral cover across the entire reef in 2025 is "only" the fourth-highest ever recorded since systematic monitoring began. Cover across the entire reef is still higher than in 2021, which itself was higher than any other time since recording began. All the highest years are in the 2020s, and yet the media is painting a dismal picture.

Relentless editorial pessimism doesn't just distort public understanding. It erodes trust and fuels a collective sense of helplessness. This isn't just about the fluctuations of one reef. It's a symptom of a deeper rot.

Trust in journalism is at a rock-bottom low, and one-sided climate scaremongering is one cause of the malaise. We're bombarded with apocalyptic narratives that paint every heatwave, storm, or ecological hiccup as the end times.

This leaves people worried and pessimistic, with youths hit hardest. Understandably, kids and teens can't stop obsessing over the endless depictions of a fiery apocalypse.

The coral reporting fits a pattern we've seen repeatedly. Bad news that can be shaped into a climate narrative gets endlessly replayed. Good news gets ignored or twisted. Even Nature magazine accepts that for decades, more CO₂ has fertilised plant growth, greening the planet. Yet, news outlets rarely report this.

Time magazine famously depicted Tuvalu as sinking into the water along with other Pacific atolls. But Tuvalu's land area has expanded, and studies show most atolls are stable or growing, as coral sand accretes faster than erosion.

Again, crickets from the media who pivot to the next horror story, like killer heatwaves, ignoring the reality that cold kills 16 times more people annually in the US alone. In the early 2000s, stories abounded about the extinction of polar bears, but when reality intruded and revealed that their population had doubled since the 1960s, the media moved on.

We are feeding our kids hysteria, not hope. This fearmongering drives lousy policy choices because when the world is on fire, only a disaster response is fitting. Governments pour over US$2 trillion annually into clean energy, mostly on inefficient subsidies that spike bills and leave the poor shivering in winter, while delivering almost no change in global temperatures by the end of the century.

Selective storytelling gives us a warped view of the state of the world. Yes, anthropogenic climate change is real, and it poses costs. But the chorus of ruination drowns out progress.

The Great Barrier Reef isn't on its last gasp. It fluctuates, but today it remains remarkably vibrant. If we let doom porn dictate our understanding of the world, then we miss the bigger picture along with the smartest fixes.

Climate hysteria in the media has really got to stop