by frog
There is an interesting debate going about whether the media can and is reporting climate change effectively. The Committee for Sceptical Inquiry notes of news coverage in America:
according to data tracked by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, climate change failed to crack the top twenty most covered news stories of the year. Even during its peak weeks of attention-in and around the release of the IPCC reports and the Nobel Prize announcement-the issue remained eclipsed by the juggernaut narratives of Iraq, the economy, the presidential horse race, and several celebrity scandals.
Climate Progress argues that the media fails by continuing to seek out conflict (or ‘balance’ as it euphemistically refers to it) in the climate change story, thus both giving credence to the scientifically discredited climate change deniers and undermining efforts to give people a true understanding of the nature of the problem:
The real story doesn’t have much conflict: It is the growing scientific (and technological) understanding that if we don’t sharply restrict greenhouse gas emissions soon, we face catastrophe…
Every time [the media] do a story with a different, blander spin, they undermine the urgent need for action. Every time they say there is a middle ground, they push us closer to the certain catastrophe of inaction.
Meanwhile Dot Earth defends the media arguing:
the main impediment to effective societal responses to global warming lies less in the count of front-page headlines than in the basic disconnect between the nature of the issue – complex, spread in time and space, laden with some unavoidable uncertainty – and the nature of human nature.
The problem here in New Zealand is that while the debate should be ‘is the government going far enough?’ the conflicts that too often are being reported are ‘is the government going too far’?
Published in Environment & Resource Management | Media by frog on Thu, March 6th, 2008
Tags: , balance, climate change, emissions, Frog, frogblog, green, green party, greenhouse, IPCC, journalism, Media, new zealand
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Perhaps the big difference is the US doesn’t have a large state media organisation, such as the BBC, staffed by lefties only too happy to collude with a big government agenda.
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frog said: “The problem here in New Zealand is that while the debate should be ‘is the government going far enough?’ the conflicts that too often are being reported are ‘is the government going too far’?”
I think part of the blame for that lies with Helen Clark, because she makes comments like the one about becoming carbon neutral, which makes it sound like the government is doing a lot, when actually they’re doing virtually nothing.
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Given that the media apparently needs to cover up even such non-stories as John Key slipping up and saying that wages should drop, I can’t imagine how we’d expect them to manage proper coverage on such a pressing issue as climate destabilisation.
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the media isnt doing a good job.
how much media is there on coal mining in nz, and the emissions that will come from pike river coal?
or the emissions from dairy export and deforestation for dairy conversion.
come on guys, pick up ya game.
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To be fair to the media, they can cover climate change, and some do a good job at it. But, the media have to sell newspapers, advertising space etc. Therefore, they publish the articles which they believe people want to see/read/hear. Can we really blame them for doing that?
There is no shortage of information on climate change which is readily accessible to people who want to find out about it.
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samiuela said:
“There is no shortage of information on climate change which is readily accessible to people who want to find out about it.”
The problem with the “balanced” media presentation is that people see a “balanced” presentation and think they have found out about climate change, without realising that most of the experts are on one side, so the “balanced” presentation isn’t really balanced after all. Since they think they have found out about climate change, they don’t research any further.
Trevor.
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Media exists to make money by selling news.
If the news is really bad it gets printed. “If it bleeds it leads”.
Right now the climate change isn’t bleedingly obvious. You can’t pin Katrina on it. You can’t attribute a mass starvation to it. You can’t show Miami-Dade going underwater.
The immediacy isn’t now (to be redundant). No matter how spectacularly bad the predictions of the end-of-the-century become, it is no skin off our collective noses as only the children among us and only a few of them, will see 2100.
Nor is the media good at balanced reporting when an issue is unbalanced.
So no, the media sucks at this sort of reporting and reliance on it is a massive weak spot in our society. It just beats the alternatives so completely as to leave us wondering what those would be.
We have a democracy. There is no real alternative as long as that is true.
BJ
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