Cross-posted from: here
I have a column out today criticizing the media’s coverage of global warming as being so poor that too many people don’t have accurate information, or any information at all about global warming or global warming legislation. Sources are below the column.
The media: Problems of the news re-cycle
MATT DERNOGA
On June 16 the White House released the “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States” report. It was written by 13 government science agencies, compiled largely during the George W. Bush administration, and completed under President Barack Obama. The report lays out the specific devastating regional impacts a warming climate would have on all regions of the country, along with the current effects of greenhouse gas emissions already in the atmosphere. The take-away message is the country would become a hellhole if there are not drastic reductions in emissions.
If a tree falls in a forest and the media aren’t around to hear it, does it make a sound? You probably didn’t hear about the report, but one story that did get a lot of press last month was how the Environmental Protection Agency suppressed an internal report that questioned the legitimacy of man-made global warming. I’m not surprised Fox News ran with the story without doing the slightest bit of investigative journalism. Even more disgraceful is how other members of the mainstream media followed suit: For example, CBS reported “EPA May Have Suppressed Report Skeptical of Global Warming”.
Any respectable journalist could recognize the “report” is nothing more than comments on the EPA’s endangerment finding greenhouse gas emissions should be regulated under the Clean Air Act, comments proposed by an economist named Alan Carlin. Not a report, and not a scientist making the comment. Strikes one and two. Strike three is that the references Carlin used for this “report” consist of recycled global warming denial talking points from blogs. Heck, one was even copied and pasted nearly word-for-word from a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Want another example of missed coverage? Think back to when Michael Jackson died. It was a day before major global warming legislation was getting voted on in Washington. Opponents were frustrated, since no one knew the House was busy passing legislation that would reorganize and replace the entire energy infrastructure of the country in a few decades. Proponents were in disbelief that the most important piece of legislation in a long time barely got a whisper.
Want more botched coverage? Try Rice University, which released a paper in Nature Geoscience about how climate models can’t explain all the heating indicated in the geologic record during a major climactic shift 55 million years ago. The message to take from the paper was “we could be underestimating how hot the Earth will get.” The headline by USA Today read “Could we be wrong about global warming?” Ladies and gentlemen, your mainstream media.
This isn’t to say that all media outlets are to blame, or that every single story about global warming is done terribly. But properly reported articles are like needles in a haystack. The truth is that far too many stories on global warming have been missed or dismissed. Most that get covered are grossly misrepresented, and make up a 30 second “he said, she said” soundbite or a paragraph buried on page A20. Fair and balanced has become more important than truthful and objective. I’m sorry to say the end result may be ink tainted with blood. We’ve all been burned by the press.
Matt Dernoga is a senior government and politics major. He can be reached at mdernoga@umd.edu
http://www.examiner.com/x-10722-Orlando-Science-Policy-Examiner~y2009m6d28-CBS-jumps-a-Whale-Shark (on CBS messing up story)
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/06/26/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5117890.shtml (CBS’s story)
http://www.globalchange.gov/ (the Global Impacts Report)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/16/climate-change-sea-level (the Global Impacts Report)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34Voi6qFZhU (Fox News reporting on EPA)
http://deepclimate.org/2009/06/30/suppressed-carlin-report-based-on-pat-michaels-attack-on-epa/ (EPA report copying Pat Michaels)
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/06/bubkes/ (more debunking of EPA “report”)
http://deepclimate.org/2009/06/28/epas-alan-carlin-channels-pat-michaels-and-the-friends-of-science/ (more debunking of EPA report)
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_Michaels (Pat Michaels of the Cato Institute)
http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/2009/07/17/countering-the-contrarians-on-global-warming/ (Rice University mistake)
http://blogs.usatoday.com/sciencefair/2009/07/could-we-be-wrong-about-global-warming.html (USA today’s bad headline)
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And they systematically get it wrong on the energy economics debate:
http://climateprogress.org/2009/05/07/media-coverage-climate-economics-pooley/
I almost wonder if the climate movement would have more success if stopped campaigning for clean energy and instead spent just as much effort campaigning for more independent media and public campaign financing.
Along similar lines, last week I sent this email to NYTimes public editor Clark Hoyt:
Four times in the last year, the Times has run a story on the western
forests’ bark beetle devastation that fails to tell the casual reader
that climate change is the most likely cause. The last three of the
four appear to have involved end-runs by the National Desk around
Erica Goode’s Environment pod – i.e. National finds an excuse to write
about the beetles, they apply a headline that doesn’t mention climate
change (or – with Jim Robbins’s July 7 article – is actively
misleading), and, if climate is mentioned at all in the story, it’s
down around paragraph 15.
Please, for the sake of future Times readers and of the paper’s
long-term reputation, consider addressing how these dual issues (“beat
hijacking” and “reader duping” (or consummate carelessness; you be the
judge)) have turned the New York Times news pages into a locus of
agnogenesis regarding what’s likely to become the most important
problem facing our civilization this century.
And if you’re _not_ going to address it, could you please say so?
Clarity is good.
The four stories I’m aware of are:
* Jim Robbins, “Some See Beetle Attacks on Western Forests as a Natural
Event” – July 7, 2009
* Jim Robbins, “A House in the Woods, After the Woods Are Gone” – July 2, 2009
* Kirk Johnson, “Beetles Add New Dynamic to Forest Fire Control
Efforts”, June 28, 2009
* Jim Robbins, “Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West” -
Nov. 17,2008
Thank you.