Twenty years on: covering climate change
I wonder what the long-term impact will be on my personality of writing about climate change.
I am writing a chapter for a book provisionally entitled ‘Media and Climate Change’, an academic text, and my focus is on the reporting of the policy texts: how the Kyoto Protocol, IPCC reports, UK Climate Bill, etc, have been received and dealt with in the press, and what impact this has had on effective action.
It can be upsetting and depressing work. It would be fair to say I’m struggling this week. One example why: read this intro to a news story I was anaylsing:
SCIENTISTS, politicians and journalists are part of a conspiracy to predict catastrophe through global warming, a Channel 4 programme suggested last night. The programme claimed that disparate groups were making this claim for their own reasons and presented data allegedly demolishing the greenhouse theory. Scientists from the Meteorological Office meet today to decide whether to complain to the Independent Broadcasting Authority.
Sounds familiar? The Great Global Warming Swindle from last year, right? No. This was The Greenhouse Conspiracy, broadcast by Channel 4, which I found while researching media coverage of the first IPCC report in 1990. Watch it on Youtube.
Upsetting and depressing. We’ve gone around in circles. And as an IPSOS-MORI report released this weekend and covered by Juliette Jowitt in the Observer, the public continue to be confused by the messages they receive through the media about the science.
How does this happen? This quote is from the report itself: Read more
Networked journalism to cover climate change
How can citizen media help improve the mainstream and commercial coverage of climate change?
Through networked journalism: professional journalists and citizen journalists working together. How it could work for climate change was inspired by a case of good/bad reporting. RealClimate.org (good) picks up on a Wired article (bad) from last month, and takes apart the weak argument (”air conditioning is better than heating”) with some fairly straightforward science. What riles RealClimate most is that:
WIRED got the story egregiously wrong, and not just because they did the arithmetic wrong. In their rush to be cute, they didn’t even make a half-baked attempt to do the arithmetic.
Some comments pin down Wired for this and blame it on profiteering (”eyeballs for advertisers”). Both the comment and RealClimate’s commentary of a ‘rush to be cute’ are straying a bit far from a fair hearing on the matter, I’d say, because even Wired has to make money, and it generally does a good job of reporting across its tech homeland under the standard pressures that journalists face: file quickly, file accurately, move on.
What’s happening now?
But digital media is now providing unlimited freedom to respond to the media’s inaccuracies; we are no longer confined to a letters page or in the hope that a printed competitor will take up the matter. Of course, even the best journalists slip up, but there is now so much media surveillance that any errors or biases are very quickly spotted and addressed. This is one of the key benefits of networked journalism for those publications that are willing to work with sites and reporting such as RealClimate’s.
Networked journalism is coming through as a powerful idea for reshaping the newsroom and news practices. This is not the technical overview, but as a brief intro, it could work like this:
1. Journalists network with the best non-professional journalists (particularly experts) to gather more and better info
2. They publish. Praised when great, and take the stick when wrong
3. Incorporate, amend, improve (win awards)
4. Grow the network, refine, use RSS, Twitter, WIkis, and produce better journalism
The only option?
No, of course this is not the only option to think about. There are, including the idea of networked journalism as option A), four ways of improving climate change reporting:
a) develop the ’21st century newsroom’ according to Paul Bradshaw, and ‘network’ the journalist into the myriad digital opportunities for improved coverage
b) put less pressure to file on normal journalists
c) train every journalist and journalism student in science reporting
d) embed journalists with scientists at the UN, IPCC, Oxford and MIT, the Radley Centre…
I’m sure you can think of more. But sticking to these four, in reverse order:
d) is not going to happen. A bit of tongue in cheek on this one
c) is also not going to happen, and is less likely than d): see Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News, which blames ‘churnalism’, the rapid output of poorly researched articles, on economic pressures that even Wired journalists would be under, and not the journalists themselves. This is not going to change any time soon.
b) is a viable option. Science training as standard for every journalist (and student of journalism). Although highly improbable.
a) then is the most likely and most effective, that goes with the flow of developing media patterns, utilizing the changes in the way we now consume and produce (as prod-users) new media, and the speed at which journalists can find, connect with, talk to, work with, and source/quote from a range of experts who are already publishing on their story issue.
Think about the quality of the Wired story if they had connected with RealClimate BEFORE they published…
‘I can’t believe The Sun’s gone so far…’
Yesterday I looked at the 40% decline in coverage of climate change in the UK national press between May 2007 and May 2008 due, most probably, to coverage of the credit crunch. While that was disappointing, today I’m taking a closer look at some of the specific coverage of climate change in May 2008, starting with the The Sun, and its Arctic blog.
Launched on April 22nd and running through to May 12th, The Sun newspaper’s Arctic blog heralded the step change for tabloid coverage of the environment that has happened in the last couple of years. From publishing just six headline stories from Oct 2000 to Nov 2006 directly about climate change, according to research conducted by Neil Gavin at the University of Liverpool, The Sun (and News of the World) published more headline stories in the first five months of this year, mainly in its Go Green section. In May this year alone, climate change or global warming received 44 mentions.
Benn’s ok, but not everyone is happy
And many of these mentions have accepted climate change is real, happening, and that we need to change behaviours. In fact, the Sun’s done so well, it’s congratulating itself (not a surprise there) quoting Environment Minister Hilary Benn for ‘leading the charge’ on climate change.
It hasn’t come without some fallout. Of the 26 comments on the article announcing the launch, over 95% were hostile to the idea of climate change, one even going so far as to claim:
I cant believe a paper like the Sun has been taken in so readily by the Global Warming Enthusiasts.
Although it may not seem far to go for many, The Sun’s coverage is, I feel, a bit of a landmark for the 3.15m people who bought a copy every day in May 2008. So what were they reading?
Development of a story: carbon credits
Good news in a way today, in environment reporting terms at least, that comes about through a story focused on a waste of environmental activity and money.
Bad news first
That is, as John Vidal writes today in the Guardian, billions are being wasted on projects funded through the UN Climate Programme. Following the work of two Stanford academics, Vidal reports:
the UN’s main offset fund [the Clean Development Mechanism] is being routinely abused by chemical, wind, gas and hydro companies who are claiming emission reduction credits for projects that should not qualify. The result is that no genuine pollution cuts are being made, undermining assurances by the UK government and others that carbon markets are dramatically reducing greenhouse gases, the researchers say.
Programmes need to be additional to planned activity or planned CO2 reductions to qualify for this programme. But as the authors of the study, by David Victor and his colleague Michael Wara, found,
nearly every new hydro, wind and natural gas-fired plant expected to be built in China in the next four years is applying for CDM credits, even though it is Chinese policy to encourage these industries. “Traders are finding ways of gaining credits that they would never have had before. You will never know accurately, but rich countries are clearly overpaying by a massive amount,” said Victor.
A silver lining in reporting
The good news is that this story has moved up from its apperance as an opinion piece, last Wednesday, written by International Rivers NGO director Patrick McCully, to today’s front page story. The issue has gained traction in the Guardian newsroom, picked up by Vidal, shifting from specialist to mainstream, and having more chance of pushing the issue–which I began following about six or seven years ago, through my work with OneWorld and then ID21–into public consciousness. It means that there is further opportunity to check the veracity of the story, and make calls to the UN and the UK government, which Vidal does. Both dispute the study by the academics.
Story development to bring about breakthrough issues
Story development is a standard practice in reporting, as is the promoting of certain stories from the specialist sections, e.g. environment, into the mainstream news agenda. Interestingly, for those of us scanning and researching, the opinion headline (’Discredited strategy’, which did not need to be specific about its subject because of appearing in the environment section) has changed to ‘Billions wasted on UN climate programme’, which means the theme is set at the headline level, not within the story. In today’s news consumption practices, this is critical (think RSS feeds, scanning online, and the time poor lunchtime executive).
A piece of research I’ve been reading recently (and writing about a fair bit) by Hargreaves, Lewis and Speers (2003, PDF), clearly identifies the importance of bringing the key themes of climate change out of the domain of science and into the mainstream, where it is more likely to connect with public opinion and public policy. Research from Neil Gavin at the University of Liverpool (to be published) also touches on the subject of the coverage of emissions trading, suggesting, in a different direction, that it is a broader European media issue. And one, I’d argue, it is important for the British intelligent press to champion.
What next?
I hope that Vidal will take the next step and keep quoting the academics, not just the new studies but also the historical research that would help keep the issue (emissions trading specifically, climate change in general) under scrutiny, where it needs to be. And get the story on the front page again when it’s not a bank holiday. A special news investigation on emissions trading impacts?
‘Balance as bias’ in climate change reporting
In a New York Times Dot Earth post on ‘Climate and the Web’, author Andy Revkin reflects on how digital media and culture can contribute to the tackling of climate change. But the article continues to support the journalistic norm of reporting with ‘balance’ which, in the case of climate change, distorts the real and certain consensus on the role of humans in creating the crisis.
The Dot Earth blog is a leap forward in climate coverage in the US elite mainstream press. These are the top four newspapers of the NYTimes, Washington Post, LA Times and Wall Street Journal that Boykoff & Boykoff call the “Prestige Press” in their paper ‘Balance as Bias’ (2004), published in the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change. Andy Revkin’s blog is clear, concise, and mainly constructive in its communication of the impact of human behaviour on greehouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, and its dangerous consequences. So, I believe Andy in this sense is doing a good job.
However, while Andy and his publisher the NYTimes.com are “conducting an experiment” to deconstruct Bush’s most recent speech on climate change, I think Andy is also contributing to the phenomenon of informational ‘balance as bias’ that Boykoff & Boykoff identified in their 2004 paper.
The ‘balance as bias’ argument is one that shows how the journalistic norm of the balanced reporting of two sides of a particular issue is problematic when one side is so overwhelmingly supported by the factual and scientific consensus, and when the other side is hugely lacking in the same level of scientific fact and peer-reviewed consensual agreement. And in regards to climate change, in the words of James Baker at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “[t]here’s a better scientific consensus on this than on any issue I know - except maybe Newton’s second law of dynamics.”
Providing equal attention to the two sides in this case (and Boykoff and Boykoff’s research over a 14 year period from 1988-2002 showed that 53% of articles gave ‘roughly equal attention’ to both sides) is a hugely disproportionate response to the actual peer-reviewed scientific support for the ’sceptical’ view. So why do U.S. journalists keep doing this? Read more
How journalism works (according to some)
Trying to avoid adding to the blog echo chamber, I have some original articles up my sleeve soon (honest) but some examples of journalism commentary caught my eye today, for a number of reasons.
Commentary One
First, the story that slid across the digital garden, so to speak, of how human sewage, or sludge, was tested as a lead poisoning fix in the homes of nine low wage black American families. This story was then picked up by new UK green reporters Environmental Graffiti who pointed out “it would be funny if it wasn’t dangerous and disgusting”. True. That is, if it is true. A US college graduate, Sarah Werning, dug a bit deeper to examine the original paper and sources of the testing, carried out by one Mark Farfel, and came to the conclusion that it was sensationalist journalism on the part of Associated Press (and Yahoo, who ran the story). The bit that interests me is Werning’s comment on the knowledge of methodological and “scientific specialisation” on the part of the reporter:
The article seems to imply that [Farfel's] reign of lead and toxic waste terror extends further than this study, but to me it makes sense that if he studies the effects of lead poisoning, he would do it more than once, and in areas with high levels of lead. I dismissed this as the reporters’ not understanding [sic] the nature of scientific specialization. The story briefly mentions that the study passed the standards at Johns Hopkins for public health studies involving humans.
Last night I read Kris Wilson’s summary of “Communicating climate change through the media: predictions, politics and perceptions of risk” in Environmental Risks and the Media (Routledge, 2000), who makes exactly the same point about the reporting of climate change: that “the reporters with the most accurate climate change knowledge were found to be full-time environmental specialists who primarily used science sources” (215). As he also points out, science writers use the term ‘greenhouse effect’ whereas “non-science writers preferred the term ‘global warming’.” ‘Global warming’ as a term is scientifically misleading for the range of changes that will occur across our planet due to the rapid anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. As such, it is a simple but effective indicator of how major terms can be incorrectly communicated across the mass media when journalists simply don’t have the scientific knowledge to get it right.
Commentary Two
Just because it’s good to know there are people out there making accurate, irrefutable claims about “how journalism works”. There is nothing that suggests the ability, over a 29 month period, to update your understanding of a particular issue, in this case biofuels, should be regarded as a journalistic disgrace. If this commentator really is “the most amusing non-stop critique of the Labour Government available” (from EU Surf) then no wonder Blair and Brown have gone unchallenged for so long.
Bias against climate change in US textbooks
This story on political viewpoints getting on university reading lists (in the US) is an important one, as it shows how the good ol’ American tradition of inserting bias into education has reached a teaching of the enviro
nment.
As some of the comments on this article say, the textbook in question (’American Government’) is a politics book, not a science textbook. And the point being…? Any publishing on issues of science must get the science right. And there’s a lot of bias around. This is a nice article on the seven types of curricular bias to watch out for.
Restricted to America? Not at all. Some archived articles covering bias in textbooks from Italy, Japan, the Czech Republic, (article from one of my favourite sites, the F-Word). And not one of my favourite sites, those homophobes and xenophobes over at the BNP even think it’s a serious issue.
Good to know Grist has its eyes on this for environmental oversight (as in the US meaning of the word, not the British). Grist editorial is a good example of covering environmental issues. They say their coverage is “gloom and doom with a sense of humour. So laugh now — or the planet gets it.” The idea that people get turned off by negative coverage was covered Futerra’s report on UK media coverage of climate change. You can downoad the report here: Futerra Media Report.
