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.
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The once famously tough minded realist Aussies are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from their woolly headed eco-hippy New Zealand neighbours. Can it really be that the land that produced Merv Hughes and Mick Doohan, to name but two, is turning into a gullible soft touch?
In about 6 months time the Republican congress will be chest deep forensically deconstructing Cap’n Trade and all her pirate handmaidens in front of lots and lots of TV cameras.
Here is my question…what is the BBC and the ABC going to do? Cover it? Ignore it and hope it all goes away?
Then there is the sweet thought that Roger Harrabin, Richard Black, Goerge Monbiot and Robyn Williams will have to report all this! Et tu guys.
This one quote says it all:
A journalist who says that is either heavily biased in support of AGW views or is lazily ignorant of the truth. Possibly both at the same time.
A journalist who can’t spot a set of blatant whitewashes by establishment figures ain’t worthy of the name.
It’s really no surprise that media outlets only project that partial bit of reality that gets viewers and then only if that bit can be blown out of proportions that serves their purpose–which is always make profit always save face.
Ratings always comes before political leanings and truth. It’s kind of ironic but if one want truth rather then rating filled drivel one has to go to the media outlets that pretty much doesn’t have any ratings what so ever, which in my country spells extreme socialist, conservative or liberal media, or even worse smallished of towneys local newspapers. :p
“Nobby says:
November 4, 2010 at 1:56 pm”
Australia of today is very diffeernt to the Australia of Merv Hughes and Mick Doohan’s day.
And yet only last night I heard an ABC panel discussion where it was put forward that both sides of the climate debate no longer needed to be put, as the science is so darn rock solid. The ABC has lost any credibility as anything except the mouthpiece of the socialist alarmists. I wouldn’t care, except my tax dollars prop up this sheltered workshop for the left
As an Australian, I would like to offer a view on the AGW situation that some of you may not thought about to date. A few days ago, I saw on German TV that Michail Gorbachev received first prize from a science academy for his past enviromental achievements in the Green movement. Peace in the cold war came about in the 1990’s largely as a result of his initiatives on behalf of the USSR with the USA, after nearly a century of world wars that mainly involved Germany. The enviromental movement seemed to start in Germany with a strong Greens Party in the 1990’s again.! Note that these events seemed to occur about the same time.
It seems to me that many scientists could see a Peace movement could be started by
the AGW issue being promoted worldwide, and they choose to sign up. Germany could see this as an opportunity to use it’s obvious technology advantages to build new industries to assist the East and West German economies to rejoin economically, and as a way to improve human health in crowded European countries by reducing CO2 levels. I am therefore not surprised that so many Nobel Laureates were in medicine disciplines.
Finally, People like David Attenborough could also see the effect of the impact that increasing unchecked world population was having on wildlife diversity, and they decided to do something about it peacefully, instead of as people in centuries past did by having wars and reducing the population to their percieved acceptable level.
Hence we have the Optimium Population Trust trying to focus our needs with other species . We should be honest with our younger generation, instead of making them afraid of being drown by rising sea levels, apart from by tsunamis. It would assist peace if all religious leaders were to embrace this concept of population containment instead of trying to be the most dominant group in the world.
a couple of posters have mentioned the following – but u have to listen to it to believe it. it is an hour long and is being repeated something like four times. what it says about the state of journalism in australia is not pretty, but it is pretty shocking:
4 Nov: ABC Big Ideas: 2010 George Munster Award Forum
Thursday 6pm (3pm WA, 5pm Q/NT) and Sunday 5pm
repeated 12am Monday and 3am Friday
Listen or Download
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigideas/stories/2010/3057366.htm
It seems that Geoffrey Lean of the UK’s Daily Telegraph has recently been laying off condemnation of AGW’s so-called ‘deniers’ and turning his attention more towards renewable energy sources etc. Is it too much to hope that the paper’s editor has ‘had a word’?
Also BBC TV’s David Shukman hasn’t been much in evidence lately. We are no longer treated to reports from presumably expensively reached locations showing him warmly clad next to open stretches of water with some bits of floating ice and with slush underfoot. All this, for the BBC’s science correspondent to claim that the Arctic is (or was at the time) melting and that this is clear proof of AGW.
I watched the Channel 4 documentary tonight on “What the Green movement got wrong!”.
It covered the Green topics where they admitted that they were wrong, the ban on DDT, the opposition to nuclear power, and GM foods. However, their view of the main threat to mankind was seen as AGW, hence the volte-face on nuclear power as it emits no CO2. This ‘threat’ was taken as read, and was given as the main personal motivation for Greens to adopt the pro-nuclear stance.
The documentary made no mention of the flakeyness of the AGW science, nor the misrepresentation of the ‘hockey stick’ graphs, nor that there as been no significant global warming in the past fifteen years. It was as if the growing realisation that the hypothesis of CO2 induced danger was wrong had not been debated, discussed, and dissected, at all.
I waited in vain to see a comment linking the Greens literally harmful wrongness on many topics to be compared to the possible harm that their wrongness in the AGW debate might bring.
Owen says:
November 4, 2010 at 4:40 am
…
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.
Actually, the specifics are the reverse. Heat accumulation increases CO2 levels, which have a negligible effect on further heat accumulation. In other words, both are dependent variables, and CO2 is more dependent than heat.
graham g says:
November 4, 2010 at 4:03 pm
…
It would assist peace if all religious leaders were to embrace this concept of population containment instead of trying to be the most dominant group in the world.
Bushwah. The meme of population containment is indeed core — and egregiously malefic.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpopulation-the-making-of-a-myth#FAQ1
Bottom line: the very best forecasts, extended, show a peak of <8bn. around 2030, followed by slow decline. Mostly due to rising living standards (= wealth and energy availability). And energy IS available, for the far foreseeable future.
Gorby and his fellow wannabe World Administrators notwithstanding.
Today, President Obama announced that the administration will not pursue a cap and trade bill because the new members for the house will not support it. However, he did say that “there is more than one way to skin a cat”. I guess this means that he will use a tzar to issue and edict. Meanwhile California and New Mexico have adopted a cap and trade bill. It remains to be seen how it will be funded. The mea culpa by the reporter reflects the mood swing that is happening about global warming. The doomsday predictions advanced by the alarmist have been out there for 10 years or more. Where is the evidence?
Most of the ad hoc evidence presented by the UN IPCC report AR4 has turned out to be unsupportable and not peer reviewed, i.e., Amazon gate, Himalayan gate, glacier gate. The oceans have not risen more than one millimeter; the islands have not been disappearing. There are hardly examples of any of the alarmist predictions that appear to be occurring. The MSM doesn’t have a story to tell that is scary enough to attract readers or listeners. So there is nothing to write about. Can you believe that our local newspaper has become so double minded about the climate change issue that the journalist author in a front page cover story fairly presented two sides of cap and trade issue.? People are tired of the line “this is being caused by man-made climate change”. The list of over 800 changes due to global warming listed yesterday on WUWT show that the changes were not significant and were speculated to be connected to and average global temperature. Even the strongest supporters of man-made climate change have only had the benefit of predictions from computer models as a basis for their concern. No one in the public and certainly not in the crowd of MSM journalists are able to understand the models or the scientific discussions about their reliability in the open literature. The MSM sources of information about AGW have proven to be wrong and unreliable.
Hopefully, the next big story about man-made climate change will be the result of the evaluation of the emails sought under the FOIA. They may end up showing the corruption by several major proponents of AGW. That story would be worth writing.
Matt, thank you for the link to Mr. Gardner’s piece about M. S. Swaminathan. I knew, of course, of Norman Borlaug, but not of Prof. Swaminathan. We don’t always learn about the true heros. And the prophets of doom, even if there is a ‘consensus’, are not always right.
/Mr Lynn
Mr Lynn says:
November 4, 2010 at 8:12 pm
…
And the prophets of doom, even if there is a ‘consensus’, are not always right.
/Mr Lynn
Heh. When, exactly, have they EVER been right? It would be a very short list, methinks.
But how much have they cost the world? That would be a very long butcher’s bill.
Hi Brian H
When have the UN ever been accurate in their predictions.?
How can you be so sure about the world populations effect on the world’s wildlife,
or on the expected cap on the population in 2040.?
You are probably correct on the energy issue, but why should the people who gave the world all of our modern benefits from European countries largely,be prepared to constrain the effect of population on world diversity just to see their efforts fail because some religious groups wish to dominate the world democracies by their sheer numbers of people in each country.? We know the AGW is a scam. ! You may be very well educated, but I suspect you are short in empathy for the world’s living resources.
I wouldn’t bet on either of our Aunties (BBC or ABC) getting out of the AGW camp any time soon. This entirely credulous article on a CO2 experiment in the US being a case in point.
Mr Lynn
If you have chance to read or obtain a copy of Dan Gardner’s latest book called FUTURE BABBLE, there is a section in the book that deals with the excellent research work of Philip Tedlock [University of California] of the on predictions made by a variety of so called experts and why most of them turn out to be so wrong. [Less accurate than a monkey throwing darts on a dart board or the flip of a coin. or random guessing] This may help us to better understand and interpret various climate warming predictions and some claims of high credibility. In summary, Tedlock found out that there are two types of forecasters. I have added my comments in brackets about the current crop climate science experts and what they are saying. You can decide who belongs in which category.
Those experts who are consistently wrong [no better than random guessing]
Not comfortable with complexity or uncertainty [the science is settled, there are no more climate science uncertainties?]
They sought to reduce the problem to some core or single theoretical theme or template that they stamp out their predictions out on [manmade greenhouse gases are the prime cause of global warming]
Very confident that their forecasts are accurate [100 year predictions with 90% confidence on future climate, claim long term predictions are more accurate than short term]
Make no mistakes or unwilling to acknowledge any mistakes [hide the decline, minimize the error once found]
Seeks public attention [makes mostly alarmist type forecasts]
Those who do better than the average expert forecaster
Different mind set
Comfortable with uncertainty [uncertainties openly discussed and welcomed, opposing views openly aired]
Draw information from multiple sources and synthesize it[skeptics heard and listened to, we do not have all the answers, natural long term planetary cycles play a role , only short term predictions made[decades not centuries]
Self critical [mistakes openly admitted and corrected]
Acknowledge mistakes and not hide errors [mistakes discussed and posted on internet]
See the world as complex and uncertain [cannot accurately model the global climate. Sees Climate models as not accurate or reliable yet]
Less confident that they are always right and acknowledge limits of their work
You mean London is not completely buried in horse manure?
Of course you are correct. It was just a bit of understatement, and an attempt at symmetry with the previous sentence.
/Mr Lynn
These reporters are so thick – if they had reported sceptical positions they would still have viewers.
Ken Stewart says:
November 4, 2010 at 5:49 am
Aunty ABC hasn’t changed its spots- still very pro-Green, pro- AGW. But maybe this article is a sign of some hope.
Ken
Ken, not if you listen to this .
This was essentially a journalists love-in, the contributors were..
Thomas Morton
Associate Professor of Journalism
University of Technology
Anne Henderson – Sellers
Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the Department of Environment and Geography of Macquarie University.
Until 2007, Professor Henderson-Sellers was the Director of the United Nations’ World Climate Research Programme in Geneva .
Sarah Clarke
ABC’s National Environment and Science Correspondent
Ben Cubby
The Environment Editor at the Sydney Morning Herald
Philip Chubb
Associate Professor of Journalism, Monash University
The topic was…
Has the scientific consensus about the increasing scale and pace of climate change rendered traditional journalistic concepts of fairness and balance obsolete?
I listened to this with an open mind as I have mixed with fair minded journalists before and know the skill required to condense complexity into a few words. But in this audio discussion, as time went on and tempers frayed, I became very saddened at the lack of scientific knowledge displayed by all but especially by the ABC and SMH journalists. ‘The fairness’ all hinged around the coverage Lord Monkton received by the Australian media, they seemed to agree that he received too much coverage and that he, to put it bluntly, was unhinged. “But what did he have to say” I kept muttering to myself, but no mention of his message was made, it was all personal attack. This would indicate no understanding or no attempt at understanding the reasoning of the alternative climate message.
As I said, I was saddened at the lack of curiosity and powerful misunderstanding of the scientific process that only left personality assessment as a discussion topic.
Margot ONeill, a least been exposed to European media and appears to be fair minded, I wish her well in her endeavours. As for this group, I despair, I really do.
Excellent link pat!
I would say there’s a bigger problem at the ABC. That’s the army of young, underpaid editorial staff they maintain as the gatekeepers on our publicly funded website. On this thread and many others where I directly criticise Aunty’s bias and unprofessionalism, my views have been censored. In the discussion for this thread I pointed out several of the big political climate stories of the last year the MSM missed. It never made it past moderation.
Without a doubt the ABC has been hijacked by its editorial staff. Not just the BSDs but also the grunts who can quietly filter out opposing opinions in the discussion on the ABC website.
graham g says:
November 5, 2010 at 3:34 am
In order:
The lowest edge of the lowest band of the UN population projection has always been accurate, for many decades. An exception, I grant you.
“Sure about the effect of the world’s population on wildlife”? Well, sureness is hard to come by. But wealthy countries are far easier on other species than desperate ones.
Population cap: see above. 8 bn by 2030 then declining slowly.
The wealthy countries limit their harm to other species because they want to. As for the historical blight, Islam, that’s another problem and kettle of fish. (As you see, I’m not big on PC circumlocutions.)
The “empathy” card!?!? Newsflash: liberal self-proclaimed empathy for critters and cultures is 90% theoretical, mainly intended and employed as a club for subduing their “immoral” enemies. As it happens, I grew up in a very small town deep in the Central Ontario forests. I know and care lots about critters and “living resources”. Your offhanded slur is despicable and contemptible. Shape up.