The Guardian has done it again, running headlines that mislead the public, feed speciesist narratives, and quietly reinforce the very myths they claim to challenge.
Take their latest: “How the world’s taste for soya is eating Brazil’s Amazon”, a perfectly packaged gift for meat eaters who only ever read headlines. They’ll skim that line, nod sagely, and walk away thinking “ah, it’s vegans and their soy milk wrecking the rainforest.” Job done. Another day of misinformation entrenched.
But anyone who actually bothers to read the article will see the detail buried inside: most soya is grown not for tofu or soy lattes but as cheap, protein-rich feed for billions of pigs, cows, and chickens crammed into industrial farms. In other words, it’s animal agriculture driving soya expansion, not the handful of vegans reaching for soy milk in the supermarket. Yet the headline, the part most people will remember and repeat, leaves that crucial truth out entirely.
It’s not just lazy journalism; it’s actively harmful. And the hypocrisy becomes laughable when you line it up against their own reporting. Just three days earlier The Guardian published a piece highlighting how less than 4% of climate coverage even mentions animal agriculture, despite it being the single biggest source of food-related emissions. They admitted the problem of silence. And then, almost immediately, they produce a headline that makes crops look like the culprit rather than the cows and chickens those crops are funnelled into.
To top it off, the very next day they churn out yet another climate article on extreme heat in major cities. Pages of detail about fossil fuels, infrastructure, global heating, but not a whisper about animal agriculture. The cycle repeats: admit the omission, continue the omission, obscure the real issue with a misleading frame.
The result? Readers walk away blaming “soya” and “crops” instead of the reality, billions of animals being bred, fed, and killed for food, with industrial farms devouring land and resources on a staggering scale. The Guardian positions itself as progressive, but when it comes to naming animal use as the driver of ecological collapse, they consistently hide behind half-truths and cowardly headlines.
This isn’t accidental. Media outlets know their audience, and many readers don’t want their bacon, burgers, and cheese implicated in climate breakdown. So editors oblige with headlines that protect consumption habits while keeping just enough nuance buried in the body text to claim balance. It’s spin. It’s complicity. And it’s one of the reasons the public remains catastrophically misinformed about the real drivers of deforestation and emissions.
If The Guardian truly wanted to inform, the headline would have read: “How the world’s taste for meat is fuelling Amazon deforestation.” But telling the truth risks offending readers. So they don’t. And the animals, the forests, and the climate pay the price.