In 2025, Los Angeles, the ‘City of Angels’ in California fell victim to one of the worst wildfires on record. The four major fires: Palisades, Eaton, Hurst, and Auto, burned more than 12,000 homes, businesses, schools, and other structures. These devastations received unprecedented coverage, revealing the media’s reluctance to acknowledge climate change, and their bias when covering disasters affecting wealthy areas.
California is no stranger to wildfires, sparking thousands annually. The 2020 season, which produced California’s first ‘gigafire’, burned over 1 million acres of land – demonstrating typical reporting patterns. Headlines focused on the immediate impacts of the wildfires, such as ‘Devastating Wildfires Sweep California’, while offering explanations like ‘Poor Forest Management to blame’ (BBC News), and political frames such as ‘California’s Failed Policies Lead to Wildfire Crisis’ (Forbes). In addition, the 2018 Mendocino fire burned in Northern California for more than three months, and the August Complex fire in 2020 lasted 87 days, however, none of these fires received the same rapturous media attention as the 2025 Los Angeles fires. This, it is posited, is because they were not in L.A.
As the home of eternal sunshine, countless celebrities, and, of course, Hollywood, Los Angeles constantly receives a flurry of media attention. The media response to the wildfires, however, was punctuated by parasocial relationships with the affected celebrities, as commentary overflowed praising stars like the Weeknd, Taylor Swift, and Leonardo DiCaprio for donating to fire aid funds (Forbes). Articles also enumerated the top celebrities affected by the L.A fires. Other headlines focused on the devastating loss of life that the fires caused, updates on evacuation orders, donation opportunities, and live coverage on the spread of the fires. The right-wing blamed the fires on increasing diversity efforts (NPR), and the Washington Post urged readers to believe the L.A fires wouldn’t affect climate denial. The direct impact of climate change was, once again, absent from reporting.
California’s average summer temperatures have increased by 1.4°C in the past century, and the state’s fire season has lengthened by 75 days since the 1970s. Higher temperatures cause faster evaporation, creating drier vegetation – increasing the probability of wildfires catching. Whilst wildfires can, and have been known to start from human activity, it is undeniable that climate change has increased their frequency. These scientific facts have been consistently ignored in reporting.
The 2025 wildfires proved that the media would jump to cover the ruin of wildfires when in highly privileged areas, whilst still refusing to admit that the climate crisis plays a large role in their proliferation. The question remains, what crisis affecting which elite community will be severe enough to force climate change to the forefront of the media’s spiral?