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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

More on the Daily Mail’s plastic love affair

Following my opinion piece over on Journalism.co.uk about the hypocrisy that would entail if the Daily Mail really were to win the Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards campaign of the year, I came across another link to a story, published by the Press Gazette, from last year.

My argument is that the Daily Mail’s “Ban the Bags” campaign was a co-opt of an already running and successful campaign that was building its own momentum. Other than that, of course, the DM’s coverage is so invidiously contradictory and generally anti-environment, particularly against legislation to combat climate change (the Kyoto Protocol, the UK Climate Change Bill), that any award would be tough to swallow; and particularly this award for the Ban the Bags campaign, as it has barely added anything new.

And so the link and quote is worth publishing:

Editor of the Mail on Sunday Peter Wright defended his newspapers’ use of covermounts and other promotions to boost circulation.

“When the history of newspapers is written, it may well be that the greatest innovation of our generation is the humble polybag,” Wright said.

And if that point is not clear enough, Wright continues:

“Any editor who wants his paper still to be here in 2020 needs to be constantly thinking about what he can add to his paper and what he can put into his polybag that will make his newspaper better value to the reader.”

How about a nice manufaturing-intense polyeurythane statuette of Janus for the average Daily Mail reader’s mantelpiece? (And before any criticisms of prejudice, I’m thinking here of my mother, who still buys the paper after working there as a clerk in the 1960s).

Tags: campaign, coverage, Daily Mail, environmentalism, Mail on Sunday, news, newspaper, newspapers, Peter Wright, Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards

Blog action day: the road to academia

Today is blog action day, and this year’s theme is poverty.

As for La Marguerite, one of my favourite personal/public blogs on climate and human responsibility, I was thinking of blogging something close to home, maybe climate related. But much of the thought process at the moment is around writing a critical incident diary for my programme of study, a certificate in teaching and learning development, and poverty played quite a role in me entering into teaching.

I did grow up in a single-parent family, in a council flat, on an estate in London. We were relatively poor, and my mother worked two jobs. Similar to the new Minister for Higher Education, David Lammy, I was the first person in my family to come to university.

But only relatively poor. The moment of poverty I remember on the road to academia was in Zambia, one morning in April 2003. More »

Tags: blog action day, blogging, blogs, economy, education, jobs, media, news, newspaper, newspapers, research, students, Zambia

Selective nominating: Daily Mail the greenest of all?

The Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards shortlist was announced Monday, with some familiar and surprising names on the list.

Can-Do Attitude
Up for Environment Journalist of the Year is Fiona Harvey, at the Financial Times, who I spoke to earlier this year. I admire Fiona: she has been a recipient of awards before, and ploughs a lonely furrow for environment coverage at the FT. She was reasonably recalcitrant to begin with, and unsurprisingly, as she’s had some difficult time with interviewers. (I’m also a fan of Media Lens, however.)

One of her reasons for continued nominations in awards such as these is the approach she, and the FT, take to reporting on the environment, which is both consistent and positive. This is what Fiona said:

Positive coverage is very much an FT outlook. We’re very solutions focused—we won’t just present the problem. Our readership is generally in positions of power. They don’t like to be told there’s a problem without some way of dealing with it. So we like to think we’ve got a very can-do attitude, it’s not just ‘oh dear’ and that’s with all issues, not just the environment.

Choking on my toast
There isn’t a single paper, and certainly not the FT, that isn’t in some way hypocritical and/or contradictory in terms of its coverage of environment and climate change. Very often, for example, stories appearing in the same paper take totally different positions, whether written by the Political Editor or Environment Correspondent.

None more so than the Daily Mail, which is up for ‘campaign of the year’. I nearly choked on my toast. Why? More »

Tags: campaign, coverage, Daily Mail, economics, environment, environmentalism, green, kyoto, media, news, newspaper, newspapers, politics, press gazette, reporting, scepticism, tabloids, water

Independent’s top 100 environmentalists

The Independent on Sunday has published a list of the top 100 environmentalists, as decided upon by its panel of four judges. And the winner?

Britain’s most successful transport campaigner has come top of the first comprehensive list of the country’s most effective greens, compiled by The Independent on Sunday.

The little-known John Stewart, who leads the onslaught against a third runway at Heathrow, soundly beats far more high-profile figures – from Jonathon Porritt to Zac Goldsmith, from Sir David Attenborough to Prince Charles – to take the honour. He does so in the wake of an important breakthrough for his campaign – the announcement by the Conservative Party that it plans to scrap the runway in favour of high-speed rail links that would supplant short-haul flights.

The runners-up are also unconventional choices, not normally found heading such lists: Professor Robert Watson, the chief scientist at Defra; Jane Davidson , the Welsh environment minister; the broadcaster Monty Don; and the polar scientist Peter Wadhams. They, and the other greens on the list, were selected for the recent impact they have made rather than for their fame by a panel of judges from inside and outside this newspaper.

The judges were: Nicholas Schoon, editor, the ‘ENDS Report’, Britain’s leading specialist environmental journal; Alex Kirby, former environment correspondent of the BBC; David Randall, assistant editor, ‘IoS’; and Geoffrey Lean, environment editor at The IoS.

Tags: campaign, environment, green, newspaper, newspapers, scientists

Camp language: watching the media on Kingsnorth

I can’t make it to Climate Camp as I’ve got a couple of deadlines approaching for a book chapter and article (both on climate change–reasonable excuse?) But to do my bit I’m going to try and monitor the language that the media uses to report on activities at the camp.

I’ll look at the different ways in which the actors and claims-makers are treated in the media. As John Richardson says in his book Analysing Newspapers, “Successive studies of journalism have shown that there is often social or ideological significance between the choices” of how subjects are treated by the media (Richardson 2007,  56). In particular, the level of agency given to the actors in a particular situation–how are they described, how are their actions described, are they given or deleted agency? More »

Tags: Climate Camp, climate change, language, media coverage, newspapers