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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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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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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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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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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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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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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