Covering climate change, now
By Jon Allsop, CJR
MAY 1,
2019
“THE MEDIA ARE
COMPLACENT while the world burns.” That’s the headline on an
article, by Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope, co-published last week by
CJR, The Nation,
and The Guardian.
“At a time when civilization is accelerating toward disaster, climate silence
continues to reign across the bulk of the US news media,” Hertsgaard and Pope
write. “Especially on television, where most Americans still get their news,
the brutal demands of ratings and money work against adequate coverage of the
biggest story of our time.”
The statistics are alarming—both
in terms of the science and in terms of the reporting. According to a 2012
study by Media Matters for America, for example, TV and print outlets, across
an 18-month period, gave 40 times more coverage to the Kardashians than to
ocean acidification. When climate change has been covered, it’s often been
covered poorly: false “debates” between real experts and denialist
cranks; the
failure to link unfolding disasters to climate change; framing
policy solutions in terms of the political horse race; the list goes on.
How can we do better? Yesterday,
Hertsgaard, environment correspondent at The Nation, and Pope, editor and publisher
at CJR, convened a town
hall at Columbia Journalism School to address that question.
Speakers including Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, and Bill Moyers debated a range
of related problems—the lack of newsroom diversity causing certain communities
to be under-served; the flaws in coverage of the global wave of climate
activism—as well as possible answers. Why don’t we put CO2 levels in the
weather report?, one audience member asked. Panelists agreed that would be a
good idea.
A major theme of the town hall
was the tension between public-service climate coverage and corporate media’s
thirst for ratings. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes—who has, in the past, called climate
change “a
palpable ratings killer”—addressed the conflict directly. “People
outside the mainstream media vastly overestimate the ability of the mainstream
media to set agendas against the grain of people’s exogenous attention,” he
said, though media insiders do “vastly
underestimate their ability” to set agendas. Either way, “Grappling with the
reality of attentional issues can’t be hand-waved away.” In March, Hayes
devoted an entire episode of his show to the Green New Deal, a package of
energy and infrastructure proposals, and booked one of its most vocal
advocates, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to come talk about it. The ratings, Hayes
said, were slightly down on a normal episode; still, at least he tried. Too
often, TV news producers don’t bother. “All of these television stations have
military guys, and former CIA guys, and tons of lawyers and judges on their
roster to be experts,” Klein said. “But climate scientists are brought in once
in a while.”
Marshalling public attention
toward weighty scientific matters is undoubtedly hard. But it isn’t impossible.
Yesterday, panelists suggested that the way we’ve covered climate change—not
the subject itself—has been putting audiences off. “One of the strongest forces
we’re up against is the sense of doom, inevitability, and kind of a
self-loathing,” Klein said. “We’re not even sure we deserve to survive. Let’s
just hang out and watch zombie movies and visions of the future that take the
apocalypse for granted.” Solution-oriented reporting—around the Green New Deal,
for example—could help change that. As Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist
at The Washington Post,
put it, we have power here. The climate “is an extraordinarily compelling
story. If we can’t tell it compellingly there’s something wrong with us as
journalists.”
CJR
Going forward, CJR and The Nation have
jointly launched #CoveringClimateNow, a coordinated effort to reframe climate
coverage nationwide. The tenor of the debate needs to change, and we can all
play our part in that. “It’s really OK for journalists, for example, to be
advocates for press rights in America,” Sullivan said. “And I think it’s also
OK for journalists to be advocates for a healthy planet.” Klein added: “There
isn’t a spare planet for journalists.”
Below
more on covering climate change:
·
Early pointers: You can
watch yesterday’s event in full here. In
their introductory piece, which you can read here,
Hertsgaard and Pope have some preliminary suggestions for improving coverage.
They include: follow the industry leaders; don’t blame the audience; establish
a diverse climate desk, but don’t silo climate coverage; learn the science;
lose the Beltway mindset; cover the solutions; and don’t be afraid to point
fingers.
·
Teenage promise: For CJR,
Abby Rabinowitz explores how
teenage climate activists are transforming coverage of the issue.
“Thanks to social media, striking teens are writing climate news, and, in some
cases, calling the strikes that make headlines and framing their message,”
Rabinowitz writes. “As told by teens, the ever-nearing deadline conveys not
just urgency, but also injustice: it’s both a science story and a morality tale
about generational violence, even homicide.”
·
An urgent disaster: In
November, McKibben, a panelist yesterday, wrote in The New Yorker that large
parts of the earth risk becoming uninhabitable due to extreme weather. “‘Climate change,’ like ‘urban
sprawl’ or ‘gun violence,’ has become such a familiar term that we tend to read
past it,” he writes.
·
A lasting shift? According
to the Times’s Lisa
Friedman, the Congressional GOP has started to take climate change more
seriously of late. “Driven by polls showing that voters in both parties—particularly
younger Americans—are increasingly concerned about a warming planet, and
prodded by the new Democratic majority in the House shining a spotlight on the
issue, a growing number of Republicans are now openly discussing climate change
and proposing what they call conservative solutions,” Friedman writes.
Other notable stories:
·
Yesterday morning, in Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, the opposition
leader, said the time had come to overthrow Nicolás Maduro, the country’s
president. Guaidó was flanked by soldiers. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,
who already recognized Guaidó as the country’s leader, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Maduro had been ready
to flee to Cuba, but that the Russians told him to stay put. (“How do you
know?” Blitzer asked. Pompeo wouldn’t elaborate.) Maduro’s government took CNN and the BBC off the air yesterday,
moments after the networks showed footage of an armored vehicle mowing down
protesters. Addressing the nation last night, Maduro said a “deranged” coup had been defeated.
·
The Mueller report may have been published, but the Mueller scoop
wars continue. Last night, the Post,
swiftly followed by the Times,
reported that the special counsel wrote Attorney General William Barr in late
March; Mueller complained that Barr’s initial memo to Congress “did not fully
capture the context, nature, and substance” of his report, and had instead
stoked “public confusion.” Barr is likely to be asked about the letter—and the
appropriateness of his actions more broadly—when he faces the Senate Judiciary Committee today. The
cable networks will have special coverage. Grab the popcorn.
·
Facebook kicked off a two-day developer conference yesterday. “I
know we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to
put it lightly,” a grinning Mark Zuckerberg told attendees. (He
waited for a laugh. He did not get one.) To combat that perception,
Facebook debuted elements of its much publicized pivot to privacy, including an
overhaul of its main app to put more emphasis on groups. Journalists are
skeptical. Going forward, “the nightmares on the platform—disinformation,
livestreamed terror, communities dedicated to targeted harassment, social
media-abetted genocide—will be less traceable by researchers and the press,” NBC’s Ben Collins tweeted.
·
Breaking this morning: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks
who was recently kicked out of Ecuador’s London embassy, where he had been in
exile, has been sentenced to 50 weeks in jail in the UK for skipping
bail in 2012, the year he entered the embassy. Last month, British police
confirmed they had received an extradition request from the US government for
Assange. Prosecutors in Sweden have also left open the possibility of charging
him with sexual assault.
·
CJR’s Mathew Ingram published
a spreadsheet that Sue Gardner, CEO of embattled investigative startup The
Markup, used to rank potential employees. Criteria included “famous,”
“justice-seeking,” and social class. (“Obviously I am guessing here,” Gardner
wrote of the latter category.) The spreadsheet is emblematic of the cultural
chasm between business and editorial practices at many news operations, Ingram
writes. “At The Markup, both sides were at war.”
·
Turmoil, too, at The Correspondent, the English-language arm of De
Correspondent, a crowdfunded Dutch outlet whose founders have been accused of
U-turning on plans to sustain a US newsroom. Management initially denied making
that promise, but have now (sort
of) apologized—and pledged refunds—after Zainab Shah, its
first US hire, and prominent supporters including Nate Silver and David Simon
said they felt misled. As Nieman Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen notes, however, key questions have yet to be answered.
·
Last week, Jim Spanfeller—who became CEO of Gizmodo Media Group
and The Onion after Great Hill Partners, a private-equity firm, bought the
properties from Univision—told Variety he had no plans to “cut our way to growth.” Yesterday,
The Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani reported that at least 25 staffers will be leaving the company as
part of a “major restructuring effort.” Senior editors Susie Banikarim, Alex
Dickinson, and Tim Marchman are reportedly on the way out. New editorial hires
are expected, however.
·
The US arm of Altice, a European cable and telecom company, is buying Cheddar, a financial-news streaming
service for millennials, for $200 million, The Wall Street Journal’s Benjamin Mullin and Lillian
Rizzo report. Jon Steinberg, Cheddar’s founder and CEO, will become president
of Altice News, a group that will include Cheddar, New York metro network News
12, and Israeli channel i24News.
·
Following a three-year push to turn its finances around, The Guardian—which, unlike many of
its competitors in the UK, has no online paywall, but instead appeals for
reader donations—has broken even. According to Press
Gazette, the paper “has more than 655,000 regular financial
contributors,” including donors and subscribers, “while another 300,000 people
made one-off payments in the past year.”
·
And CJR’s Zainab Sultan spoke
with Kathi Duffel, an English teacher at a California high school whose newspaper
plans to publish a profile of an 18-year-old student who is a sex worker. The
school district demanded to review the story and suggested Duffel, who advises
the paper, could be fired if she fails to hand it over. She has no plans to
comply.
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