Member-only story

How Many Paintings Were Damaged by Climate Activists? Probably Zero.

Ray Katz
3 min readAug 31, 2023

--

The headlines lie and nobody reads the articles

Climate activists are always accused of damaging paintings. The media lies about this— consistently.

I’ve been seeing the headlines for years. Frequently. I saw one today:

“Climate activist smears paint over Tom Thomson piece at National Gallery of Canada”

That’s the headline.

This point is repeated in the body of the story itself which states that a climate activist from a group called On2Ottawa “splashed paint on Thomson’s 1914–15 painting ‘Northern River.’ ”

The very next sentence belatedly corrects the error that appears in the headline and the body of the story itself. We learn that a video show the activist “smearing pink paint on the glass that protects the oil on canvas painting.” (italics and bolding mine)

Do a Google search. Find stories on all the similar incidents to this one. Have ANY paintings been damaged by climate activists? It’s easy to find stories that mirror this one — headlines reporting damage and somewhere in the story an admission that the painting was safe behind glass — undamaged. But read these stories. What does the headline say? What does the story say?

What ACTUALLY happened?

I don’t know why the news media get these stories wrong so consistently. One could be cynical and…

--

--

Ray Katz
Ray Katz

Written by Ray Katz

Internet pioneer. But I’m most interested in stabilizing the Earth’s climate and promoting our common humanity. WeAreSaners.org

Responses (1)