Having worked in TV and radio for 30 years, this story really hit home for me. When the editors and newscast producers see climate change as ratings losing proposition, you know the battle for eyes and ears has been lost by the climate alarmists. – Anthony
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A stormy forecast for climate change reporting
By Margot O’Neill
Not all journalists believe the media has done a good job in reporting climate change.
Fresh from a sabbatical studying climate change reporting at the University of Oxford, the ABC’s Margot O’Neill considers whether or not the media has done a good job.
WHATEVER HAPPENED to climate change? This time last year climate change was a hot topic regularly appearing in news bulletins and on front pages. Phrases such as “the future of humanity could be at stake” were quoted, celebrities marshalled and 4,000 journalists prepared to descend on the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen. Apparently humanity’s future is now secure… or so it might seem given the paucity of journalism devoted to the issue in the mainstream media.
Where did all the climate change stories go? “The [programmers] are against it because it loses ratings,” says a senior BBC journalist. “The wave [of public interest] has gone. There is climate change fatigue. That is why I am not [reporting] it now.”
Other journalists agree. Even reporters at The Guardian, which especially targets environmental reporting, complain that it’s difficult to get a run. Another UK broadcast journalist said he was warned that putting climate change on prime time would risk losing a million viewers.
In a series of interviews with some of the UK’s top specialist environment and science correspondents, I explored the changing climate for reporters covering global warming – as part of the ABC’s Donald McDonald research fellowship at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. Most of the journalists rated the media poorly on communicating what some have dubbed the epic news story of the century. “We have failed to engage the public,” said a broadcast journalist.
The key problems? The list is long but includes a cold winter in Europe, the distant impacts, the failure of the December 2009 UN climate change Copenhagen summit to produce a binding international agreement, public confusion about whether there is a reliable scientific consensus, and alarmist media coverage with Hollywood-horror headlines like “Be Scared; Be Very Scared!” that are more likely to induce the purchase of popcorn than solar panels.
‘Climategate’
The biggest hurdle mentioned by most journalists was the so-called ‘Climategate’, the controversy surrounding the publication of hundreds of hacked emails from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK between influential climate scientists. It was a “defining moment in all our careers,” according to an environment editor.
Given the underlying science has been exonerated in successive inquiries, what is it that the journalists believe they were guilty of? Firstly, they missed a cracking story that was instead first pursued by the blogosphere and which proved to be, unlike many other climate change stories, a hit with the public. After struggling to find stories the public wanted to read, a tabloid journalist observed “Climategate … got a strong response; it made climate change more topical.”
Many journalists say the UEA email hacking, combined with the discovery of an error regarding the melting of the Himalayan glaciers in the 2007 report by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), also proved they had failed to cast a critical enough eye on climate science and that they had been far too dismissive of sceptics.
Read the rest here, well worth the click.
Ian Holton,
it is all La Nina mate. September for us here in my neck of the woods in the ‘Shaky Isles,’ (N.Z.) was the third wettest month on record since records started in June 1928! La Nina is good for us though. The switch was flicked at the beginning of October and the tap was turned off, the sun came out and the wind changed direction. Farmers are preparing for what can often follow the big wet month of a typical La Nina episode, the Big Dry! Our big dries don’t compare in the least with what you jokers get in Oz. Our big dry is only relative to our normal ‘green’ situation. Farmers are obviously not keen on it. But the rest of us are looking forward to a long hot summer.
Having said that, winter-like conditions are about to give our mountains one last coating of snow which could take this year into first place for the heaviest mountain snowfall aggregate of the past 30 years just ahead of 2009, and 2008!
This is more an article of concern that a message that the reporters still believe in is not getting across. One line from the article struck me straight away; I am surprised it has not been picked up yet as it demonstrates what is actually thought:
“Given the underlying science has been exonerated in successive inquiries, what is it that the journalists believe they were guilty of? ”
In other words the writer thinks that there is CAGW but the media are guilty of failing to get the message to the public. This article shows no change of heart but is more a call to put the CAGW message across in a more effective way.
I can’t avoid thinking that Traditional Journalism is loosing another war. Though largely suppressing the information on Climategate, most folk connected to the internet have read about it by now. And in fact, getting that information through e-mail from a friend or reading one’s favourite blog, while the MSM just whistle to the side, lends much more importance to the news. If I read this in a blog while the media says nothing about it, certainly there must be something wrong…
This is information in the XXI century. And thankfully WUWT is a major part of it.
“Given the underlying science has been exonerated in successive inquiries, what is it that the journalists believe they were guilty of”
I didn’t realize that the underlying science was ever investigated, let alone “exonerated”. The writer makes it a matter of fact (use of the word “given”) Nonsense – the MSM has been a willing participant and partner in selling the alarmist message. In terms of the credo of most news media namely “objective, balanced, reporting”, they are guilty of betraying their professional mandate and are in the main simply an amplifying voice box for their masters. There are many fearless journalists around the world that have helped to expose and topple tyrants, so one can only muse that the global warming/climate change/disruption cabal have an especially long and scary reach.
The Australian A.B.C. is so left leaning it nearly falls over.
There have been so many inquiries into the A.B.C.’s bias it is laughable.
A balanced A.B.C. climate debate will include 6 alarmists and maybe a sceptic.
The author of the article is still a believer
Is a crack appearing.
” How we adapt to a dramatically changing climate, if or when it emerges, could, sadly, become the most compelling story of all.”
Will become the most compelling story of all, when we are forced into having to adapt to increasing cold events over the next 14yrs, sadly.
If one can predict weekly weather for many years ahead, then future climatic trends can be defined, it does not work the other way round, sadly.
The MSM has pump primed the AGW issue and now it is pay dirt.
Governments and big business can all cash in.
It will take the MSM about 10 years of ‘Real’ reporting to turn this ship around.
I am sorry but most of the journo’s these days are lazy spoon fed bottom feeders.
Thanks for nothing guys.
Today was the coldest November day ever recorded in Townsville, North Queensland, Australia of 23.8 degrees maximium, and this is summer in the tropics.! Australia has less than 200 years of recorded temperatures, and probably only reliable data since 1900. it still has been the coldest day for at least 110 years.
The West Virginian Democrat who ran the election TV advertisement of him shooting the poster of the Cap & Trade Bill with a scoped rifle knew what he was about .
Guess what , he was reelected a few days ago, when 60+ of his Democrat mates lost their seats partly for supporting Obama’s Cap & trade Bill.
I used to only read The Guardian paper and the BBC website. After it became obvious that they weren’t just taking a point of view — which is fine, everyone has one — but actually omitting and exaggerating, to the point of lying or even braindeadedness, I stopped reading them.
I still like what Chichton said about the greens; what they get wrong is the problem of complexity. See some of the comments in the other threads, where people argue that yes, CO2 increases breathing problems because in a round-about-way, some other thing has a knock on effect on something else… well, if your chain of causality is that tenuous, it is also subject to a million other causes and chaotic unpredictabilities.
The greens decided they wanted to save the planet — they stared into complexity and promptly lost their minds; they reverted to magical thinking.
Meanwhile the people of the world are trying to live life guided by ordinary consequences, and climate change never materialised as anything real.
Oh, where is Raymond Baxter (of the BBC) and his ilk from the ’60s and ’70s. Poor Raymond must have turned so many times in his grave, he must be half way to Australia by now.
(nice little dig at the Yanks – could not resist it…)
P.S. Just watched the BBC’s flagship science program last night. Apparently, some meteors might contain water….. (One hour to explain that one – fell asleep at the 35 minute mark.) The rot set in when the BBC started advertising for science reporters and producers on Sesame Street.
.
They are cleaning their vests and running for the exit.
AGW Climate Change is dead.
We have known this for a long time now but it is nice to have it confirmed.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/11/we-knew-this.html
Bobby D got it right when he wrote the lines “You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows” or a climate change reporter.
Richard Lawson:
Re Channel 4’s documentary this evening (“What the green movement got wrong!”), I fear this will prove to be little more than an exercise in clearing the decks so that they (the greens) can focus all their attention on promoting CAGW. Here’s an extract from Channel 4’s trailer: “A group of environmentalists … believe that, in order to save the planet, humanity must embrace the very science and technology they once so stridently opposed“.
Perhaps Krishnan Guru-Murthy (who chairs the “debate” that follows the film) will press for an answer to the obvious question: if you got all these things wrong, what possible confidence can we have that you haven’t got this wrong too? But, given Channel 4 News’s track record – where Guru-Murthy is one of the main anchors – I’m not holding my breath.
In this particular case propaganda, hyperbole, and disinformation on either side will only temporarily win the day. The climate itself will settle the argument. If arctic ice continues to melt, if tropospheric temps continue to rise, if scorching summers, disruption of world agriculture, increasing wildfires, and rising sea levels threaten our way of life, people will be furious with deniers and skeptics. If it gets only mildly warmer and actually even pleasant, people will laugh at and mock the climate scientists.
Either way, nature will decide. I actually believe the the preponderance of evidence to date supports the former rather than the latter. I don’t think the scientists are wrong in their general conclusions that increasing heat accumulation will follow increasing CO2 levels. The specifics are up for grabs.
Mike Haseler asked:
“Anyone remember swine flu?”
Yes, and I remember Bird Flu that came before it and the SARS that came before that. In each case it was Chicken Little running around in a frenzy. How many in Australia died of Bird Flu? How many in the US died of Bird Flu? How many in Australia died of SARS? How many in the US died of SARS? The answer for each of those is zero. Just as now with ‘Climate Change’, the media would feed us daily doomsday prophesies for whatever Armageddon happened to be in vogue. Apparently stupidity sells, and who better to deliver it than the MSM.
Well, an epiphany if not a real reversal. As noted by a commenter or two, they’re still buying the “exonerated in successive inquiries…” , so it it fairly obvious they haven’t changed their journalistic standards in regards to climate. But, I was heartened to read, Not all sceptics are equal Maybe, just maybe, they’ll quit trying to paint us as neanderthals, incapable of understanding the science which they, themselves obviously don’t understand.
-S says:
November 4, 2010 at 2:56 am,
Fine comment.
Owen says: [ … ]
Wrong. Sea levels are rising due to the emergence from the LIA. The tropospheric “fingerprint” of AGW is nowhere to be found; it is a myth. And CO2 has no measurable effect on temperature.
The proponents of AGW scare tactics are beclowning themselves. The smart move would be to get on the right side of the debate.
Oh to be a fly on the wall of the journalists’ room when Climategate broke. Imagine the dirty looks being exchanged. They had told each other the science was settled – and it isn’t … and they’ve made fools of themselves … I am not much given to rejoicing at another’s misfortune, but humiliation was amply merited here after their high-handed behaviour over this issue.
When Climategate first broke I hounded “our” ABC for several days asking why the hottest news story in the world sweeping the blogosphere wasn’t even getting a mention anywhere and a search of the name on their website only came up with one reference, which actually had nothing to do with what was going on. I and many others inundated them with complaints and regular counts of the daily mounting thousands of Climategate hits on Google and Bing until they were finally dragged kicking and screaming into giving some coverage, albeit fatally biased and uninformed.
That same bias has continued to the extent I no longer watch any of their current affairs programs.
Nothing will change until it has a complete cleanout from top to bottom and that’s unlikely to happen give that the organisation is stacked with rabid Left-wing propagandists who are under the delusion they are journalists. What a laugh! Fortunately, the internet will continue to make them increasingly irrelevant.
I reckon they’ve now realised that there’s far more anti- than pro-AGW news to be had, so the best thing to do is shut up and adopt the principle of : “no news” = “good news”.
“Yes, and I remember Bird Flu that came before it and the SARS that came before that. In each case it was Chicken Little running around in a frenzy.”
Your bias is showing.. please make your statement to the families of the medical practitioners just across your border in Canada who DIED doing the ultimate.. dying from SARs caught while treating SARs patients..
So that people like you can made dispicable comments about chicken little behaviour.
Coldest November day on record in 3 Queensland towns today. 22 in Mackay- that’s 7 degrees below average. November is supposed to be hot and dry, maybe some storms. Coolest, wettest spring in many years across most of Oz. La Nina of course but it makes it hard to sell warming right now.
Aunty ABC hasn’t changed its spots- still very pro-Green, pro- AGW. But maybe this article is a sign of some hope.
Ken
Not bad. Now all she had to do is exchange “climate fatigue” for “we got caught out gilding the AGW lily even though we knew it was a weed” and the job’s a good ‘un.
The odd thing about the article is the remarkable lack of perspective. There is no big picture view offered.
Climate science has been embraced (and some might argue, captured) by people with a certain political viewpoint: the Neo-Malthusian/enviro-Gaia/Club of Rome/the sky is falling types. If you analyze what climate alarmists say (both scientists and non-scientists), you quickly see that climate alarmism is only one manifestation of a consistent political narrative: humanity is rapidly using up all the resources and destroying the Earth, so economic activity must be drastically curtailed. Which means rich people (who consume much material and energy) must become poorer, and poor people must never become rich (that is, never consume much material and energy). The most extreme of these folks call for drastic reductions (like >90%!) in global human population as the only way to “save the Earth”. Warming due to GHG’s simply a convenient weapon to advance the Neo-Malthusian agenda. Were GHG driven warming not considered a problem, many other rationals would be offered to justify political control of the scale of economic activity. The argument is never going to end with improved scientific understanding of Earth’s climate; it is not, and has never been a scientific issue.
It is clear from the tone of the article that the author is solidly in the same political camp, and so accepts at face value the Neo-Malthusian political narrative. Which is why there is so much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth in the article about ‘poor reporting’. The author’s dismay with the situation tells us more about her political POV than about the quality of reporting of climate science. Her analysis is superficial and mindless… quite typical for Neo-Malthusians.