Guest essay by Eric Worrall
If you think you are being continuously bombarded with nonsense climate scares, think again – Guardian author Lisa Hymas wants more climate stories in the press. She has also accused President Trump of distracting her fellow journalists from reporting about climate disasters.
Climate change is the story you missed in 2017. And the media is to blame
Lisa Hymas
Some of Trump’s tweets generate more national coverage than devastating disasters. As the weather gets worse, we need journalism to get better.
Which story did you hear more about this year – how climate change makes disasters like hurricanes worse, or how Donald Trump threwpaper towels at Puerto Ricans?
If you answered the latter, you have plenty of company. Academic Jennifer Good analyzed two weeks of hurricane coverage during the height of hurricane season on eight major TV networks, and found that about 60% of the stories included the word Trump, and only about 5% mentioned climate change.
Trump doesn’t just suck the oxygen out of the room; he sucks the carbon dioxide out of the national dialogue. Even in a year when we’ve had string of hurricanes, heatwaves, and wildfires worthy of the Book of Revelation – just what climate scientists have told us to expect – the effect of climate change on extreme weather has been dramatically undercovered. Some of Trump’s tweets generate morenational coverage than devastating disasters.
Good’s analysis lines up with research done by my organization, Media Matters for America, which found that TV news outlets gave far too little coverage to the well–documented links between climate change and hurricanes. ABC and NBC both completely failed to bring up climate change during their news coverage of Harvey, a storm that caused the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in the continental US. When Irma hit soon after, breaking the record for hurricane intensity, ABC didn’t do much better.
Coverage was even worse of Hurricane Maria, the third hurricane to make landfall in the US this year. Not only did media outlets largely fail to cover the climate connection; in many cases, they largely failed to cover the hurricane itself.
…
If we are to fend off the worst possible outcomes of climate change, we need to shift as quickly as possible to a cleaner energy system. We could expect more Americans to get on board with that solution if they more fully understood the problem – and that’s where the critical role of the media comes in. As the weather gets worse, we need our journalism to get better.
Lisa Hymas is the climate and energy program director at Media Matters
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/07/climate-change-media-coverage-media-matters
What a shocker – normal people find President Trump’s efforts to make America great again more interesting than yet another climate warning.
Here’s a hint Lisa – If you want to generate interest, make an effort, try to find something new to say about the climate. Trying to paint every photogenic storm as a sign of the end times is lazy journalism. Repeating the same tired climate claims every time the wind blows a few trees down tries the patience of normal people.
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So if global warming causes hurricanes, why did they occur in 2017 AFTER the greatest cooling period in recorded history? 2016 has the hot El Niño summer but no Cat 3 landfalls.
What we have here is an example of a lack of situational awareness from a minor apparatchik of the swamp. She doesn’t realize that the reason “Climate Change” has dropped so low on the agenda of the “media” is because the whole swamp is threatened right now. The prime objective of the “media” is to get Trump and everything else has become secondary because if they fail the consequences will be frightful for them. The best way I can try to explain it is as a concept known in the military as “economy of force” where by one must sacrifice advancement or defense in areas deemed less critical in order to concentrate all available assets towards achieving what has been deemed at the time to be the most critical objective. Generally achievement of that most critical objective will result in markedly improving the prospects in the less critical areas. In short the swamp is currently on the defense and has mustered all it’s forces to fight off the outsider in the WH and that includes it’s “media”. This fact is lost on this poor girl.
Now that we know the “intelligence agencies ” have record of every phone call and E mail , we just need to follow the Clinton model . Buy an expensive fake dossier , hand it to your pals in the FBI who can use it to gain access to anyone’s communication they target under false pretences . Let’s see the communication between Al Gore , the clean energy lobbiest AG ‘s , the IPCC . The freedom of information channels are such a time consuming process when the information can all be pulled .
The digital Guardian edition have now demoted their Environment section off the front page. It is now 2 clicks away instead of 1. More importantly, there’s no immediate link to it from the front page.