Climate reporting: good, bad, experimental: 2
Yesterday I looked at an example of bad environment reporting. Janet Raloff’s failure to apply traditional news values in reporting a flawed attack on the IPCC opened up the danger that a ’scanning’ reader of the article, on the US Science News site, could believe the attack had credibilty.
Janet picked up the story from a poorly attended press conference. Which concerned her, but not enough to handle the story in a different way, or not at all. Responding to Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News (which I’ve yet to read… I ordered it for our library, and then some other buggers researchers borrowed it before I got my hands on it), Director of the Science Media Centre Fiona Fox writes a defence of the press conference for getting science stories into the hands of journalists. What does she say? Read more
Climate reporting: good, bad, experimental: 1
A number of posts this week from Fiona Fox, Charlie Beckett and the Knight Science Tracker have gone into the writing of these two linked entries (second one tomorrow). My subject is responsible, well-researched journalism that remains aware of its power to influence its audience. Practice of this journalism is an essential part of tackling climate change.
And Janet Raloff gets it wrong
Picked up by the Knight Science Tracker earlier this week was a story written on Monday for US Science News by Janet Raloff, their science reporter. It’s a great example of the traditional inverted pyramid having value in the news reporting of environment issues.
Raloff attended a poorly attended press conference where Arthur Robinson, co-founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in Cave Junction, put forward a spurious, flawed and baseless ‘petition’ of, he claimed, 30,000 scientists who think the IPCC has got it wrong on climate change. The petition has no credibility. The IPCC are right. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are the main cause of dangerously accelerating climate change. Note that I am not linking to, and therefore validating, Arthur Robinson. Note, also, that I have clearly invalidated his petition. This was not Raloff’s approach: what did she do? Read more
