‘Deniers are a little crazy, you know…’
Two things I picked up off the blogs last night. First this story from the PEW Centre for excellence in journalism: that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have buried environmental stories. And second, this news clip likening climate change deniers to a drunk crazy guy who got stuck in his toilet. “They’re just a little crazy, you know,” said Fox News Anchor Shep Smith.
‘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?
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
North America inaction on climate change
Anyone wanting to understand how politics gets its bad name should read this New York Times’ article covering the climate bill debate in the US Senate this week. The one that was rejected on Friday, an outcome welcomed with unadulterated glee by a number of denier sources.
Many of the leading 100 good men and women of the United States proved that you never lose the ability to be a child through their squabbling, bullying and obstructions to critical political debate. Senator James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, ‘Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee’ led the political denial of the problem. Read his rebuttal of the climate tax bill. (It’s not a climate tax bill, of course, but the ‘Climate Security Act’. That’s rhetoric at work, on both sides one could argue). He refused to take questions. He refused to talk science. Take a look at what they get up to:
Strange, then, that a Republican manoeuvre forced debate to stop for a reading of the entire 492-page document. That sounds to me more like a tactic of a bruised and petulant teacher who fears his student knows more than he does. Mind you, that politicians can resemble both arrogant headmasters and kindergarten kids in the blink of an eye is nothing new for followers of British politics, and the jeering and cheering that supports the name calling in the Houses of Commons.
Matthew Nesbit at Framing Science brought attention to research released this week in the journal Environmental Politics that illustrated the widening gap between Democrats and Republicans on the issue of climate change. The report is worth reading in full. While 73% of Democrats believe warming is due to human activities, only 42% of Republicans think the same (and declining).
However, together that is over 50% of all partisan votes, so why did the Climate Security Act get only 48 votes in the Senate? As reported, neither Obama or McCain voted (here’s Obama’s reasoning, and McCain’s) . Andy Revkin over at DotEarth referred to a previous interview he had conducted with John McCain to reflect upon McCain’s assertion that:
democracies don’t do well with this kind of long-term, looming threat.
What, then, is the damage to the planet of the US neo-con ambition of exporting democracy to the rest of the world? Maybe it’s just North American democracy; picked up this week by DeSmogBlog was Canada’s inaction on climate change:
Sloughing off a court decision which held that a proposed Imperial Oil (i.e. Exxon Canada) oilsands project is an environmental hazard in the waiting, the Conservative Cabinet of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave a green light to the development yesterday.
In response to which, Canadian papers tucked the story into the business pages - in those cases where you could find any coverage at all.
All is not lost, however, at least in this week’s repoting. Coverage from RealClimate and the New Scientist on the solving of a scientific problem that has given climate change deniers some grist for their mill. The issue was this:
Average global temperatures have steadily risen during the 20th century – the graph of increasing temperature is an image frequently used to illustrate man-made climate change. But the graph does not climb steadily: a number of dips and rises occur over the century.
One of these, late in 1945, is more pronounced than the others. The cause of the 1945 dip has so far remained a mystery, something highlighted by people who doubt that climate change is caused by human fossil-fuel burning. They say it is proof that burning fossil fuels cannot explain changes in the climate during the 20th century, given that fossil fuels were being burnt throughout.
The reason, however, when you read the articles, was human error in the data collection, rather than climatic reasons. That is, different buckets were used between European and US ships when collecting sea water, than this made a difference to its temperature. But, as RealClimate points out, the deniers will jump onto anything, and claimed even this (the incorrect use of buckets back in the 1940s) was enough to warrant a shaking of the very foundations of contemporary climate science.
It isn’t of course. But, back to the Senate, not even the environmental lobby were behind the Climate Security Act.
Although I’ve criticised the DotEarth blog in the past for some overexuberance in promoting a balance-as-bias view (too much space for too few deniers remaining), this entry by Andy Revkin provides an overview of what could, and must, happen next if North America is to get out of the sticky mess it’s got itself into. World leaders? No more.
Media’s blind eye to advertising
Yesterday I wrote about protests by publishers and car manufacturers against plans by the EU to introduce compulsory rules governing pollution info on car advertising. In last night’s 7pm Channel Four flagship news programme, the producers covered the story (good) but relegated it to the ‘And Finally…’ slot (bad) generally reserved for the more lighthearted story of the day.
I want to pick up on this, because news media play an important role in developing the public’s broader understanding of political and health issues.
Is Climate Change a serious issue or not?
Serious political and health issues are well covered, in general, by C4. And, just like smoking (the example C4 used as a parallel), climate change is both a political and health issue. So why the almost clownish approach? Watch it for yourself:
By relegating the story to the lighter-hearted final slot, through its ordering of scenes and interviews, by its very headline (’Driven to Distraction by Brussels’) and therefore by its emphasis on certain aspects of the story, the importance of the issue was downplayed. If this health threat concerned fire hazards in toys or flooding in the home counties, would it have be covered in the same way?
Media’s blind eye to advertising
No. And the reason is, I feel, the fact that advertising came into the mix. This report provides what I see as an example of the ‘institutional blind eye’ from which media suffers in relation to advertising. Generally this comes, in relation to climate change, in the form of charges of hypocrisy levelled at writing articles criticising government and business, but accepting advertising money from polluting products (airlines, car manufacturers etc). MediaLens picked up on this. For the Guardian, Monbiot and the readers’ editor responded.
But last night was interesting in that the turn of this blind eye became in many ways more subtle, challenging and, I feel, dangerous. The relationship moved beyond one of reliance, to one of defense: that is, this report, this news piece, made advertising the hero, in exactly the same way the car is made the hero by advertising. Read more
‘Cheaper to cover Britney than the IPCC’
Considering the undressed lengths that Britney has been reaching for press coverage recently, this is not a surprising. But thanks to Alisa Miller, CEO of Public Radio International in the US, this fantastic Friday headline is now legitimately used.
In a five minute talk to the TED conference, Alisa neatly visualises the American mainstream news media coverage in February 2007. This was on the back of some research from the Pew Centre for Excellence in Journalism and their State of the News Media report. Take a look at these maps, the first by land mass. 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
‘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
