The Status Quo Media

Media coverage of global warming has not been very good nor is it likely to improve. Historically, even the most respected newspapers have fallen into the trap of giving the same credence—and often the same amount of space—to a handful of U.S. scientists, most receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry, as they give to hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists. No surprise that much of the public has ended up with a misimpression about the remarkable strength of our scientific understanding and the need for action (see chapter 8).

The study "Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S. Prestige Press" analyzed more than 600 news articles published from 1990 to 2002 in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal. The study found "significant difference between the scientific community discourse and the U.S. prestige press discourse." For instance, "53 percent of the articles gave roughly equal attention to the views that humans contribute to global warming and that climate change results exclusively from natural fluctuations."

In my blogging since mid-2006, I've found that the media coverage has not improved much. Why? One reason is that as the climate story has become a first-tier political story, more and more pieces are being written by senior political reporters, who know very little about global warming and who haven't bothered to educate themselves on what is indisputably the story of the century. Instead, they employ the horse-race perspective that dominates today's political coverage, attempting only to measure who is up and who is down. The publication on the web of the e-mails stolen from UK researchers in late 2009 allowed many media outlets to continue to miscover the science and give undue credence to those spreading anti-science disinformation.

Media critiques are among the most popular Climate Progress.org pieces. As the selection of posts in this chapter shows, media coverage across the board—from the science to the economics to the solutions—is still doing a grave disservice to the public.

Media Enable Denier Spin Part 2: What If the MSM Simply Can't Cover Humanity's Self-Destruction?

March 5, 2008

If those who are counseling inaction and delay succeed, billions of humans will suffer unimaginable misery and chaos, while most other species will simply go extinct.

Maybe the best one-line description of our current situation that I have read is:

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

That's the final sentence in Elizabeth Kolbert's fine global warming book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, and as I'll show in this post, it is entirely accurate.

How can the traditional media cover a story that is almost "impossible to imagine"? I don't think they can. I'll be using a bunch of quotes mostly from Andy Revkin of the New York Times, not because he is a bad reporter—to the contrary, he is a leading climate reporter—but because now that he has a blog, he writes far more than any other journalist on this subject and shares his thinking. A new Revkin post, "The Never-Ending Story," underscores the media's central problem with this story:

I stayed up late examining the latest maneuver in the never-ending tussle between opponents of limits on greenhouse gases who are using holes in climate science as ammunition and those trying to raise public concern about a human influence on climate that an enormous body of research indicates, in the worst case, could greatly disrupt human affairs and ecosystems.

This sentence is not factually accurate (the boldface highlighting the passages at issue is mine). It would be much closer to accurate if the word "worst case" were replaced by "best case" or, as we'll see, "best case if the opponents of limits on GHGs fail and fail quickly." The worst case is beyond imagination. The word "holes" is misleading. And this isn't a "tussle"—it is much closer to being a "struggle for the future of life as we know it." And all of us—including Andy—better pray that it ain't "never-ending." Before elaborating, let me quote some more:

One of the unavoidable realities attending global warming—a reality that makes it the perfect problem—is that there is plenty of remaining uncertainty, even as the basics have grown ever firmer (my litany: more CO2 = warmer world = less ice = rising seas and lots of climate shifts).

Some skeptics have long tried to use the uncertainty as an excuse for maintaining the status quo. Campaigners for carbon dioxide curbs seem reluctant to acknowledge the gaps for fear that society will tune out. So the story migrates back to the edges: catastrophe, hoax. No doubt.

This last paragraph sums up the problem for the media. As an aside, I don't know what "gaps" or "holes" Revkin is talking about, but as I will try to make clear, they don't really exist in the sense that any typical reader would expect from the context.

The "story migrates back to the edges," not because that is inherent to the story, but because that is inherent to all modern media coverage of every big issue. Let me quote Newsweek editor Jon Meacham from last month:

I absolutely believe that the media is not ideologically driven, but conflict driven. If we have a bias it's not that people are socially liberal, fiscally conservative or vice versa. It is that we are engaged in the storytelling business. And if you tell the same story again and again and again—it's kind of boring.

The real climate story doesn't have much conflict: It is the growing scientific (and technological) understanding that if we don't sharply restrict greenhouse gas emissions soon, we face catastrophe—that is the right word, the one Kolbert sticks in her title.

The conflict is actually a political one between those who believe in government-led solutions and those who don't. This is a central point. As Revkin himself notes about the Heartland denier/disinformer conference, "The one thing all the attendees seem to share is a deep dislike for mandatory restrictions on greenhouse gases." As I explain (see chapter 7), a central reason that conservatives and libertarians reject the scientific understanding of human-caused climate change is that they simply cannot stand the solution. So they attack both the solution and the science.

It simply is not accurate to say the real edges of this debate are "catastrophe" or "hoax." Revkin and every reasonable...