Climate reporting: good, bad, experimental: 1
A number of posts this week from Fiona Fox, Charlie Beckett and the Knight Science Tracker have gone into the writing of these two linked entries (second one tomorrow). My subject is responsible, well-researched journalism that remains aware of its power to influence its audience. Practice of this journalism is an essential part of tackling climate change.
And Janet Raloff gets it wrong
Picked up by the Knight Science Tracker earlier this week was a story written on Monday for US Science News by Janet Raloff, their science reporter. It’s a great example of the traditional inverted pyramid having value in the news reporting of environment issues.
Raloff attended a poorly attended press conference where Arthur Robinson, co-founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in Cave Junction, put forward a spurious, flawed and baseless ‘petition’ of, he claimed, 30,000 scientists who think the IPCC has got it wrong on climate change. The petition has no credibility. The IPCC are right. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are the main cause of dangerously accelerating climate change. Note that I am not linking to, and therefore validating, Arthur Robinson. Note, also, that I have clearly invalidated his petition. This was not Raloff’s approach: what did she do?
Instead, Raloff’s headline “When is a consensus on climate change not a consensus?” suggests doubt of the IPCC consensus. She then communicates Robinson’s views for the next eight paragraphs, before only countering the petition in the last few paragraphs. As the KST comments:
This is not a bad way to construct a short story for a literary magazine. As news, it’s chancy… Raloff with just a few hints of subversive intent writes the top of the story straight. She lets the man make his points without much of a peep, Only deep does she get around to reasons she doesn’t believe the conference host has an honest tale to tell. That’s dangerous - an awful lot of people read the first few grafs of a story and move on.
Online, the majority of people scan rather than read stories. So in this article they are likely to pick up the headline, Robinson’s argument, and perhaps some of Raloff’s hints that she is sceptical of Robinson’s petition. What they don’t get is a clear, unequivocal piece of news that shows Robinson’s petition is rubbish. What they also don’t get is an understanding that this is old news, from a repeated publicity stunt. As the comments on the Knight Science Tracker article make clear, and any quick research will show you, this is an old story:
If memory serves, this is the third time this particular attention-seeker from Cave Junction has pulled this publicity stunt. I don’t object to the reporter not challenging his claim immediately in the story, but not to mention the past record makes the story simply incomplete. And actually, when you think about it, the editor too should take some responsibility for that. Kit Stolz
The problem is, this publicity stunt has got picked up by a number of blogs, newspapers and individuals and keeps the denier-believer nexus alive and, frankly, wasting useful energy. Credible journalists and journalism outlets therefore have to take decisions on what to report ever more seriously, because…
News media matters
As hundreds of journalism researchers have argued, summarised well by Hargreaves, Lewis and Speers (2003) (.PDF) in their broad survey of public understanding of three science issues (including climate change), “the news media clearly play a role in informing the way people understand science” (2003: 5). But their study suggests that:
most people are aware of the main themes or frameworks of coverage of science related stories–anything else is unlikely to get across. These themes and framworks are then used as building blocks for people to make sense of an issue, and while this sometimes allows people to make informed guesses about those issues, it can lead to misunderstandings (2003: 5).
If people are spotting the headline (and headline news matters; the headline frames the story, and draws in the reader, and is the most read element) and scanning the rest of the story, the themes they take away from Raloff’s story as building blocks to develop their judgements are likely to be: ‘doubt over consensus’ and ’scientific uncertainty’. Which is not responsible, well-researched nor impact-aware journalism. Some of Raloff’s other posts are equally saggy.
Back in the Cave
And a reader could even come away thinking ‘poor PR stunt in a cave is cause of climate change, if it’s happening’. That last one is not a joke. Robinson’s from Cave Junction, and the press conference was badly attended. The Hargreaves et al research also shows that people turn thematic relationships into causal relationships. For example, their respondents thought that both nuclear power (44%) and the hole in the ozone layer (65%) were as significant causes for climate change as is CO2 (66%). This was thought to be due to the fact that climate change, nuclear power and ozone layer issues were thematically linked by the media in their environment reports.
An argument for the 5Ws+1H, and a straightforward and consistent narrative on climate change reporting, if ever there was one.
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