Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
First it was the scientists, issuing dire warnings that the world is warming up because of human activity. But the media watered down their warnings; some media outlets questioned the validity of their claims, others simply downplayed it. And the politicians enthusiastically went along.
Then came the children, led and inspired by the words and actions of teenage leaders like Greta Thunberg, who isn’t just calling for action against climate change, she’s demanding it. Thunberg just came across the Atlantic Ocean on a solar-powered sailboat to advance her message: We can no longer wait; we must do all we can now to reduce global warming, or else her generation has no future.
And this time around, some in the media are readying themselves to cover the issue far more truthfully and aggressively. In an article titled, “The media are complacent while the world burns,” two seasoned journalists — Mark Hertsgaard of The Nation and Kyle Pope of Columbia Journalism Review — write at length about the media’s failures to give climate change the coverage it deserves.
The pressure for ratings is a big reason why media limit their coverage of climate change — one journalist called it a “palpable ratings killer,” a disincentive for television journalism if there ever was one. But a bigger failure, Hertsgaard and Pope argue, is in how the issue has been covered:
“Perhaps the media’s most damaging climate-change error has been to cover a science story as if it were a politics story,” they write. Since the early ’90s, both newspapers and television outlets have been presenting the issue “as a disagreement between two equally valid viewpoints: one from a scientist who affirmed the consensus articulated by the vast majority of peer-reviewed studies, the other from a contrarian who disputed that consensus and, in many cases, was funded by fossil-fuel interests, though rarely was that association known or disclosed.”
Their article goes on to suggest ways that media outlets can improve their approach to climate change coverage, from the general (“listen to the kids”) to the specific (integrate climate coverage into other reporting).
My two favorites in their list: Cover the solutions, not just the problem, and don’t give any credence to the deniers. The sooner we embrace the science (and existing technologies), the faster we can find ways to mitigate the looming catastrophe.
Hertsgaard and Pope wrote this lengthy article last April, before a conference was held to consider the media’s climate coverage going forward. Out of that came a media initiative called Covering Climate Now, or CCN. Signed up for the CCN initiative are 250-plus news outlets around the world, claiming an audience of more than 1 billion people.
Led in part by the British daily newspaper, The Guardian, this is an alliance of media outlets that are committed to muscling up their climate coverage (in part by sharing their content with each other) with a new sense of urgency. This is “the defining story of our time,” says CCN.
The mainstream media had better sound the alarm.
Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at: