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Climate of coverage: Lord Turner’s report

The beginning of this week saw the press respond (or not) to Lord Adair Turner’s new report on reducing our UK carbon emissions as part of his role as chair of the government’s Committee on Climate Change. Taking a snapshot (or synchronic, to use the technical term) analysis of the coverage of the report in the papers on Monday, Tuesday, provides a useful bellwether in understanding exactly how our national press are thinking (or not) about climate change. More »

Tags: analysis, campaign, comment, coverage, democracy, discourse, economics, economy, environment, environmentalism, green, Guardian, Helweg-Larsen, IPCC, Journalism, Lomborg, media, news, newspaper, newspapers, politics, professionalism, reporting, research, rhetoric, scepticism, scientists, tabloids

Shelling out on sustainability

Energy company (didn’t they used to be an oil company?) Shell are running a series of web dialogues, with today’s (6am GMT time, unfortunately they are not supplying the coffee) on ‘Sustainability Communications’ with their V-P for Comms, Björn Edlund.

Early skirmishes between the Comms team and the great unwashed (it is 6am) remind me something of either a manicured garden or Capoeira - well managed and quite elegant to look at or watch, in its own way. If Bjorn and his team are not at present reclining in Lazy Boys in reality, metaphorically it seems they are. Perhaps that is the nature of self-selection for those who would be taking part in such a web chat.

The most interesting Q/A so far (6.32am) is this: More »

Tags: activism, alism, biness, Bjorn Edlund, campaign, capitalism, comment, economics, economy, environment, environmentalism, Foucault, greenwash, hegemony, jobs, language, media, news, politics, professionalism, programming, psychology, regulation, reporting, representation, research, sharing, Shell, students, training, US

Round-up on Gore NYT editorial

There was lots of coverage of Al Gore’s “The Climate for Change” editorial in the New York Times on Monday. Gore takes the opportunity of Obama’s victory to pin together as tightly as possible climate change with energy security. It’s argument for action summed up is this:

Here’s what we can do — now: we can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.

A couple of U.S. bloggers, notably Skeptics Global Warming, annotated the editorial with their own opinion as rebuttal.  For example, More »

Tags: America, comment, coverage, energy security, Gore, news, Obama, politics, scepticism, US

Climate change likened to ‘Y2k scam’

One of the most arresting case studies in Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News, about the ‘churnalism’ of poor reporting/stories that is sweeping through the journalism industry as the result of its commercialisation, is about Y2K - the millennium bug.

Davies successfully shows how a ‘non-story’ fed itself, both politically and in the press, until it was a major moral panic that costs millions (and made some people millions), and took up a huge amount of column inches in newspapers and magazines worldwide. And at one minute past midnight on Jan 1, 2000… nothing happened. It was a fake story, blown up out of nothing. But that didn’t stop most major news outlets and governments acting as if it was real: check out this retro BBC map of ‘millenniun bug’ infected countries. For an even better BBC entry on the bug, the h2g2 website got it absolutely right… More »

Tags: BBC, blogging, blogs, churnalism, comment, Copenhagen, image, indtry, Journalism, language, Lomborg, magazines, media, news, newspaper, newspapers, politics, reporting, research, science, sharing, US

Engaging across blogging divides on climate

Last week, an anthropology PhD student in New Zealand wrote a summary and response to a paper I gave at the Association for Journalism Education annual conference, in September this year. I though her commentary was a thoughtful piece with a fair set of conclusions: that bloggers self-select their networks based on beliefs. And that my beliefs were as rigid as any “climate sceptic”.

One thing Picking Up Sticks noted in the piece was the lack of engagement across the networks; “deniers” and “believers” rarely talk. This is a currently recognised theme online, and not just around climate change: take the U.S. election, for example. The TV producer Adam Curtis described blogging self-selection in an interview with The Register last year: More »

Tags: advertising, blogging, blogs, censorship, comment, denial, deniers, education, environmentalism, Guardian, industry, IPCC, Journalism, magazines, McIntyre, news, PHD, politics, psychology, reporting, research, rhetoric, scepticism, science, scientists, students, Sunderland, training

Five reasons Brendan O’Neill is wrong

Articles decrying environmental practice as “a tyranny of environmentalism” which is leaving people with more “fear, self-loathing and a religious-style sense of meekness than any piece of anti-terror legislation ever could” are interesting cultural artefacts to examine.

Like fossils, they help us understand how previous cultures and the people that lived in them went about their business; how they were able to internalise huge global inequities by focusing on impossibly narrow elements of societies and their rare incidents of rhetorical argument. E.g., such as the work of newspaper columnists.

This is the type of fossil that turned up in my RSS feed this morning, from Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked, writing today in The Guardian. I felt like one of the actors in Bonekickers, faced with the same quality of writing.

Firstly, comment is free–up to a point. That’s why we have things such as the 1976 Race Relations Act to ensure socially-accepted parameters on the treatment of individuals are upheld, whatever you want to think about freedom of speech. (By the way, I worked unpaid for Index On Censorship, and I’ve led editorial projects in the Balkans, so I have some pedigee). Second, I have no problem with O’Neill bringing issues to the table in this way, and a national newspaper is probably the best place to debate them.

The problem is that journalism, even opinion, is meant to say something new, be interesting, and be accurate.

This article is none of these things: it’s a rehash of something O’Neill did back in 2006, when he was already late to the party on assessing the rhetoric of climate change debates. In that sense, the article is predictable and disappointing in a number of ways, adding nothing to the debate. So, why else is it so bad? More »

Tags: climate change, comment, environmentalism, rhetoric