The call to end the media's
climate silence gets a bit louder
In 1988, author Mark
Hertsgaard penned the book On Bended Knee, a story of a tame
Washington press corps that offered little resistance to the charms of
President Ronald Reagan.
It was a far cry from
the 70s, when Hollywood paid tribute to crusaders like Woodward and Bernstein
and journalism schools drew record enrollment for a suddenly sexy profession.
For 2019, Hertsgaard has
turned his focus to a media on thin ice. This week, he and co-author Kyle Pope
launched a campaign, "Covering Climate Change: A
New Playbook for a 1.5-Degree World," to turn around media
failures in addressing the urgency of climate change.
The official launch is April 30 at a meeting of journalists,
scientists and climate advocates to discuss climate coverage
and launch "an unprecedented, coordinated effort to change the media
conversation."
Writing in The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review, Hertsgaard and Pope said "at a time when civilization is accelerating toward disaster, climate silence continues to reign across the bulk of the US news media."
Media failures
This isn't the first
swing and a miss by the U.S. media
Today, Reagan is
remembered with reverence by most of America. That was a neat trick for a
leader who hatched the Iran-Contra Scandal, in which the U.S. covertly sold
arms to arch-enemy Iran in order to fund a shady right-wing militia in
Nicaragua.
It was arguably as big an outrage as anything President Nixon or President Trump could conjure up, and it passed without much media outcry.
It was arguably as big an outrage as anything President Nixon or President Trump could conjure up, and it passed without much media outcry.
Then we saw another
massive media failure in the near-total lack of skepticism over the invasion of
Iraq, where a detestable leader was falsely said to be building an arsenal of
weapons of mass destruction.
Both of these were major
journalistic failures: Iran-Contra shook America's confidence in its leaders
and embarrassed the U.S. globally. Iraq took tens of thousands of lives and
revitalized, rather than killed, Islamic extremism.
However, climate change
will kill or dislocate millions, and its impacts on both civilization and
ecology may never end.
The media's climate
change failures are greatest on national TV news.
The liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America frequently points out that cable and broadcast news programs routinely fail to link climate change to the seemingly nonstop weather disasters – hurricanes and typhoons; floods and downpours; drought and polar vortices.
The liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America frequently points out that cable and broadcast news programs routinely fail to link climate change to the seemingly nonstop weather disasters – hurricanes and typhoons; floods and downpours; drought and polar vortices.
Networks offer several
dodges for this: The depth-free brevity of national stories doesn't allow for
detours into heady stuff like climatology; the audience isn't interested;
or that definitive evidence hasn't arrived yet.
In fairness, the second
of these may be valid: Climate can't hold a candle to the blandest of
Kardashians.
Presidential debates,
too, have a sorry history of absolute silence. The 2008 race is the last time
that presidential nominees were tossed a climate question, and both men and the moderator all
muffed it.
Bob Schieffer of CBS News asked about "climate control," a term from the realm of plumbers, not climate scientists.
Bob Schieffer of CBS News asked about "climate control," a term from the realm of plumbers, not climate scientists.
After Senator John
McCain gently corrected him, neither he nor Senator Barack Obama spoke a word
about any kind of climate, instead steering their answers to
the virtues of energy independence, including domestic oil and "clean
coal."
Like Iran-Contra and
Iraq, there are reporters in the trenches who have tried to sound the alarm,
sometimes to the detriment of their own careers. And the Trump Administration
provides such a bounty of scandal and hypocrisy that climate denial is rarely
seen as breaking through to the Top 10 headlines on any given day.
The New Playbook
But if America, with
climate denial firmly ensconced in the White House, fails to lead the world
away from a climate disaster, our news media is partly to blame. The new
project from Hertsgaard and Pope aspires to the tall order of reversing
American media's disdain for covering climate change like the existential
crisis that it is.
They offer a few
prescriptions for journalism to change our way of thinking about the radical
changes the world faces in its energy and consumption habits: Listening to
scientists, for example, would be a no-brainer start.
And news executives should school themselves on climate the way they often do on foreign policy, because if nature's hell-bent on a 3 to 5 degree Celsius temperature rise, we'll all eventually be learning the lessons and covering the high stakes anyway.
And news executives should school themselves on climate the way they often do on foreign policy, because if nature's hell-bent on a 3 to 5 degree Celsius temperature rise, we'll all eventually be learning the lessons and covering the high stakes anyway.
In my days as a
Management Weasel at CNN, I used to exhort the correspondents and producers to
report science and environment stories that looked smart the day they aired,
and would look even smarter 20 years from now.
Some major traditional
news outlets, like the New York Times and Washington
Post, have upped their game. Others are setting themselves up to look
dumb. And dumber.
The "New
Playbook" takes on a huge goal.
But it's one worth
aiming for.