The Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards shortlist was announced Monday, with some familiar and surprising names on the list.
Can-Do Attitude
Up for Environment Journalist of the Year is Fiona Harvey, at the Financial Times, who I spoke to earlier this year. I admire Fiona: she has been a recipient of awards before, and ploughs a lonely furrow for environment coverage at the FT. She was reasonably recalcitrant to begin with, and unsurprisingly, as she’s had some difficult time with interviewers. (I’m also a fan of Media Lens, however.)
One of her reasons for continued nominations in awards such as these is the approach she, and the FT, take to reporting on the environment, which is both consistent and positive. This is what Fiona said:
Positive coverage is very much an FT outlook. We’re very solutions focused—we won’t just present the problem. Our readership is generally in positions of power. They don’t like to be told there’s a problem without some way of dealing with it. So we like to think we’ve got a very can-do attitude, it’s not just ‘oh dear’ and that’s with all issues, not just the environment.
Choking on my toast
There isn’t a single paper, and certainly not the FT, that isn’t in some way hypocritical and/or contradictory in terms of its coverage of environment and climate change. Very often, for example, stories appearing in the same paper take totally different positions, whether written by the Political Editor or Environment Correspondent.
None more so than the Daily Mail, which is up for ‘campaign of the year’. I nearly choked on my toast. Why? It is nominated, according to the Press Gazette, for its “Ban the Bags campaign to get supermarkets to stop giving away disposable plastic carrier bags – which scored major successes earier this year.” For example, these stories:
Banish The Bags: The Mail launches a campaign to clean up the country … and the planet
Shoppers’ huge NO to free bags: 140 towns join our crusade
The reason why I find this award nomination difficult to swallow is that, just before, and overlapping with the ‘Ban the Bag’ campaign, the Daily Mail was also running its ‘Great Bin Revolt’ campaign. This one was aimed at getting the ‘bin tax’ — a plan to get overpolluting families to contribute more to their refuse collection cost (seems sensible to me) — scrapped from the UK Climate Change BIll.
What was wrong with this campaign was that it was trenchantly anti- the Climate Bill, and de-authorized the challenge of tackling climate change through legislation. It absolutely threw the bill out with the bathwater, without barely a mention of the real, growing, global crisis of climate change. The Daily Mail’s coverage of climate change is outright petty, useless and ideologically driven to inaction. Even when they publish articles supporting action on climate change, the libertarian right weigh in picking up on its loose reporting and inaccuracy.
Rejection of the Climate Bill
Of the 45 stories that the Daily Mail ran between 1st Jan 2006 and 31st July 2008, 23 rejected the Climate Change Bill outright, while a further 8 argued it was of ambiguous or uncertain use in combating climate change. Why? Because there was a bin-tax in there, one tiny element of a huge and important piece of legislation. 70% of all articles on the Climate Bill carried by the Daily Mail rejected the bill, and their tone and tenor were sceptical of the need for ordinary people to fight climate change:
|
Newspaper |
Totals |
|||
|
Accepted |
Rejected |
Ambiguous |
Total |
|
|
Daily Mail (& Mail on Sunday) |
14 |
23 |
8 |
45 |
|
31% |
51% |
18% |
|
Out of interest, compare this to the other big national tabloids:
|
The Sun (& News of the World) |
11 |
6 |
1 |
18 |
|
61% |
33% |
6% |
|
|
|
Daily Mirror (& Sunday Mirror) |
14 |
1 |
0 |
15 |
|
93% |
7% |
0% |
|
|
|
Daily Express(&Sunday Express) |
1 |
7 |
2 |
10 |
You can see the Daily Express followed the same ideological route to de-legitimizing the Climate bill. Whereas the Sun and more so the Daily Mirror were behind the need for the Bill, despite its bin-tax.
Awarding the ‘vile’ Daily Mail the ‘environmental campaign of the year’ award would be like giving George Bush the Nobel Prize instead of Al Gore because Bush uses thermal springs to heat water in his home. A drop in the ocean compared to his wholesale rejection of Kyoto and compulsory action on reducing emissions.
Yes, getting rid of plastic bags is a great thing. But companies were on their way to doing this BEFORE the Daily Mail got on board. The government was behind it — and editor Paul Dacre and Gordon Brown are buddies. This was the easiest campaign to run, a clear winner, no losers, no tough choices.
What is the point of these awards from the Press Gazette? Reward the playground bully for not beating up the other kids once in a while? Or actually rewarding newspapers who in difficult economic and environmental times take on the challenges of punching their weight, not simply picking the easy battles?
Let’s hope the winner for this environmental award is the Exeter Express and Echo for its nominated “Green shoppers” campaign.
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