If you google “NBC climate reporter,” the first person to come up is Chase Cain.
For nearly eight years, the veteran meteorologist covered the most existential threat to humanity for one of the country’s biggest broadcast networks, traveling to Antarctica, reporting from inside the Palisades fire, and earning lots of big awards along the way.
But Cain isn’t an NBC climate reporter anymore, he tells HEATED in an exclusive interview. Last week, the veteran journalist resigned, citing burnout from near-constant internal fighting to get important climate stories on air—stories that he says were routinely deprioritized, buried late in newscasts, or cut entirely.
“It just really got to that point where I was just kind of exhausted by the sales, by the constant trying to explain and remind, like, hey, this is important. Please run this story,” Cain told HEATED. “It just wore on me after a while.”
In our conversation, Cain talks about the subtle ways climate coverage is suppressed at NBC—not through explicit directives, but through a thousand small cuts over time. HEATED podcast producer Tracy Wholf, a veteran of both CBS and ABC, shares similar experiences. ”The networks, I think, are bending the knee to the current political atmosphere,” she says.
Listen to the full conversation at the top of this newsletter. It’s also available on all your podcast apps and YouTube.
Coincidentally, Media Matters has just released a report analyzing climate coverage at NBC, CBS and ABC over the last year. And the data backs up everything Chase and Tracy say in today’s show.
According to that report released Wednesday, corporate broadcast climate coverage dropped 35 percent from 2024 to 2025—from 771 minutes to 505 minutes across NBC, CBS, and ABC combined.
Even more stunningly, only 8 percent of all corporate broadcast climate segments mentioned fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change. So even when corporate news networks do cover climate change, they systemically refuse to explain why it’s happening.
