Credit crunch hits coverage of climate change
Headline coverage of climate change in the UK national press has dropped by over 40% since May 2007.
In May 2007, 103 headline stories in the top 20 UK newspapers carried either ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ or ‘Kyoto Protocol’ in the title. In May 2008, that figure had dropped to 59.
One month’s statistics could be a blip, of course, so I took a look at the whole of 2008 so far, in comparison with 2007. These are the results, first January-May 2007:
And then January - May 2008:
You can see that for these five months, the best month in 2008 (March, with 79) doesn’t even come close to the worst month in 2007 (May, with 103). While the Guardian has maintained a trend of near every day reporting, other titles have reduced their coverage. Of course quantity is not the same as quality, responsible or positive coverage. I’ll get to this in my later posts this week (tomorrow on The Sun; and you’ll be surprised about how much and how positive…). But in numbers, coverage is falling. And the trend is generally downwards.
So what’s happening? Read more
Imagining our environment: Hiroshi Sugimoto
Research for my PhD took us last weekend to the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg and an exhibition of the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. The Japanese-born New Yorker Sugimoto has been exhibiting since 1987 and is recognised as one of the outstanding contemporary photographers. Contemporary, but using almost archaic photographic equipment and practices, such as an old 19th century large-image camera, and an army of assistants touching up the black and white prints by hand.
It is this approach, along with the subject matter, that now draws me to Sugimoto as a case study of how we ‘talk’ about - in visual and verbal languages - and therefore represent the environment.
Why the environment?
Many of Sugimoto’s images are of, or relate to, how we experience the environment, both built and ‘natural’. Some of his most arresting images are of architecture in slow exposure (blurred) focus, teasing out how great design is strengthened by reconnecting with its more impressionistic, ‘yet to be realised’ image in the architect’s mind: what the design must have first ‘felt’ like. This urge to reconnect what we experience is the present with what we have experienced in the past, either internal or external to ourselves, is central to Sugimoto’s work, and is the kernal for perhaps his most emotive and powerful work, his Seascapes. Read more
Media’s responsibility to climate change
The UK tabloids and US broadsheets were both in the news this week for their poor coverage of climate change. Poor in either volume (US) or tone and accuracy (UK).
In the UK, The Guardian picked up on new research carried out by Max Boykoff and Maria Mansfield at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, reporting on the coverage of climate change in the tabloid press (.PDF). They analysed 974 articles published between 2000 and 2006 in the Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Mirror, and found that:
UK tabloid coverage significantly diverged from the scientific consensus that humans contribute to climate change. Moreover, there was no consistent increase in the percentage of accurate coverage throughout the period of analysis and across all tabloid newspapers. Findings from interviews indicate that inaccurate reporting may be linked to the lack of specialist journalists in the tabloid press. (Boykoff and Mansfield, 2008)
These are in line with findings in another paper, by Neil Gavin at the University of Liverpool, presented at the Political Studies Association conference in Bristol, September 2007. Gavin found a similar paucity of content in the tabloids, which was, again in line with Boykoff and Mansfield, that tabloid coverage has been consistently low over the period. It’s worth a closer look at the issue… Read more
