Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Legendary journalist Edward R Murrow famously provided live reports of German tanks crossing the Polish Border. Columbia Journalism Review thinks journalists today should copy his example, and defy their editors when sending reports from the front lines of climate change.
Why Can’t We Call It An Emergency?
By Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope
JUNE 3, 2021TV NEWSMAN BILL MOYERS likes to tell the story of how Edward R. Murrow, the pre-eminent US broadcast journalist of his time, insisted on covering what became Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Murrow’s bosses at CBS News had other priorities; they ordered Murrow’s reporters to cover dance competitions in Hamburg, Paris, and London, explaining that Americans needed some happy news. Murrow wouldn’t do it. “It’ll probably get us fired,” he told his colleagues, but he sent his correspondents to the German-Polish border; they arrived just in time to witness Hitler’s tanks and troops roar into Poland. Suddenly, Europe was at war. And Americans heard about it because journalists at one of the nation’s most influential news outlets defied convention and did their jobs.
Today, all of humanity is under attack, this time from an overheated planet — and too many newsrooms still are more inclined to cover today’s equivalent of dance competitions. The record heat waves and storms of 2020 confirmed what scientists have long predicted: climate change is underway and threatens unparalleled catastrophe. And because carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere for centuries, temperature rise and its effects are only getting started. As one scientist said as wildfires turned San Francisco’s skies orange last September, “We’re going to look back in 10 years, certainly 20 … and say, ‘Wow, 2020 was a crazy year, but I miss it.’”
A handful of major newspapers are paying attention. But most news coverage, especially on television, continues to underplay the climate story, regarding it as too complicated, or disheartening, or controversial. Last month, we asked the world’s press to commit to treating climate change as the emergency that scientists say it is; their response was dispiriting.
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This message is muted at best today, and the result is predictable. In the United States, only 26 percent of the public is “alarmed” about climate change, according to opinion polls analyzed by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communications (a member of the CCNow consortium). One reason why? Less than a quarter of the public hear about climate change in the media at least once a month.
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Read more: https://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/climate-emergency-statement.php
There is a reason news rooms don’t provide more coverage of the “climate crisis”. Most of the material which climate activists want newsrooms to print is not actually news.
“Glaciers to melt in 50 years” – does that get your heart racing? Glaciers melting next year would be far more interesting, but near term predictions carry significant risks. In 2019 Glacier National Park had to quietly remove their “Gone by 2020” signs, after the glaciers failed to melt on schedule.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes provides an excellent explanation of why climate news does not receive more attention;
Did anyone notice a few weeks ago, when a 1600 square mile iceberg broke off the Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica? Of course not. Big icebergs happen from time to time, they don’t affect anyone’s life to any significant degree. It is not likely this iceberg will show up anywhere interesting. What happens in the Antarctic tends to stay in the Antarctic.
Events which actually affect people’s daily lives, like efforts to pressure city politicians to actually do some of that road maintenance they keep promising, are far more relevant and interesting.
Hayes did point out that people’s interest in climate change jumps when other events occur, like when a big wildfire somewhere which threatens people’s homes. Big fires are an opportunity for activist journalists to slip in a few climate messages, because a major disaster is an opportunity to make climate change seem relevant. But the interest in climate change rapidly fades away after the fire is contained.
There is one aspect of the climate crisis which is consistently newsworthy, which WUWT will continue to highlight: all the politicians who seek to take advantage of people’s fear of climate change, to pass their economy wrecking big government boondoggles, and the scientists who provide cover for the politicians with their evidence lite models.
A rise in taxes or government deficits this year is far more important to most people, than a load of empty hype about events which might happen 50 years from now. Who cares about some big iceberg, when your job security is at risk?
The modern equivalent of Edward R. Murrow that reports on the horrors of climate change is much more like Baghdad Bob.
Climate change has front lines?
There are so many boondoggles going on now that it’s hard to get too excited by any single one.
“Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope are the authors. Mark Hertsgaard is the executive director of Covering Climate Now, the environment correspondent for The Nation, and the author of HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. Kyle Pope is the editor and publisher of Columbia Journalism Review.”
And neither one of them know a buret from a cuvet, but they’re claim standing to lecture us about climate science. It’s righteous hubris.
Mark Hertsgaard is a full blown nutjob.
What a steaming load of fecal matter! Clearly the authors are propaganda enthusiasts rather than journalists. Edward R. Murrow’s reporters were all rewarded with empirical evidence of Germany invading Poland. To date, there isn’t one iota of empirical evidence supporting AGW (or the above nonsense). So far the only observable results of the “climate” changing since the LIA has been a small but extremely beneficial warming and ample evidence of CO2 greening on many parts of the world. However there are large areas which show no apparent change at all. Furthermore there is no human signal whatsoever.
On a planet that has been cooling steadily since the Holocene Optimum, ~8000 years ago and gradually sequestering our precious life giving gas, CO2, there can be no argument that adding CO2 back into our atmosphere is fortuitous, if unintentional
Reading the Columbia Journalism Review is equivalent to reading Workers World, Beijing edition. I don’t think the CCP Politburo even reads them.
One problem is that almost no reporters are competent to cover stories on climate change. They do not have a deep — or often any — knowledge of the subject, are not versed in science or statistics, and are easily duped by sensationalist stories from scientists with an agenda.
Even in the unrealistic, worse-case RCP 8.5 fantasy climate simulation, watching and reporting on the climate scam is like reporting on paint drying in super slow motion.
Yeah, that’ll sell clicks and eyes… not.
Journalists claiming something to be true is not the same as the something is, in fact, true. I long ago lost whatever confidence I had in what journalists say..
That would be like running a live report on paint drying only 10 to the six times slower
For the analogy to Climate Change to ring true, Murrow would have to have sent his correspondents to the Polish border in 1920 with headlines blaring “German Invasion Imminent!!!“.
You can tell an audacious lie and repeat it often enough to get a rise out of the people but when you tell it long enough they become either skeptical or bored.
Did it ever occur to these guys that we’ve already looked back 10, 20, 30 years at what the Sli-Cli guys said would happen by now? It hasn’t happened.
“Wow, 2020 was a normal year. They missed it.”
Slightly off topic
I watch a bit of WW2 war history on social media.
I am seeing more and more video footage from the German side.
I’m sure the footage was always there to find. It’s just doesn’t seem to be held back.
From the article…”And because carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere for centuries…”
Stopped reading there. What level of scientific training have these people received? More heat, more storms, where? The records shows weather events are pretty bland and usual.
Is there anyone who believes that most newspapers aren’t already doing everything they can to report on the non-existent global warming emergency?
What does this guy want, for the reporters to start inventing even bigger lies?
Bad analogy. WWII was real.
“Legendary journalist Edward R Murrow famously provided live reports of German tanks crossing the Polish Border …”.
Murrow was stationed in London, strictly speaking it was William L Shirer who was stationed in Berlin and who recorded his dispatches in Berlin Diary.
As far as I know no non-German journalist witnessed the actual invasion the exact timing of course was top secret, although it was expected anytime.
Shirer followed the Wehrmacht into Poland and witnessed the Schleswig-Holstein anchored in Danzig shelling the Polish garrison.
He also accompanied the Wehrmacht into the Low Countries and France and there is a photo of him reporting on the signing of the French armistice.
Haha. You couldn’t get more arse over elbow than that. It’s like the Mann calling real scientists Lysenko-ists when a good look in the mirror would reveal to him a genuine one.
We are living through an age of hysteria.
I used to think a lot of this was attributable to the nonsense of Post Modernism and its acceptance by the college educational establishment. It had arguably led to the wholesale adoption of moral and epistemological relativism, in which ‘right’ means ‘right for me’, and ‘true’ means ‘true for me’.
I felt this was behind the absurdities we read about every day, when calm rational argument is called violence, but arson and riot are called mainly peaceful demonstrations. And when manifest absurdities become the consensus to which lip-service must be paid, on penalty of mobbing.
But as this has gone on, I have come to see it was too superficial a view. The rise of Post Modernism, relativism etc is probably in reality a consequence and symptom not a cause. The underlying phenomenon is an hysterical abandonment of rational thought. We are really going back to the middle ages and to the concept of orthodoxy and heresy, and to the indulgence of mob hysteria. We saw it in the former Soviet Union, and in late Maoism, and in Cambodia. We are seeing the same phenomenon here.
Consider not simply the Guardian, with its style guide, its endless invocations of the Climate Emergency, and its substitution of ‘global heating’ for ‘warming’. Consider also Stonewall, whose latest move is to recommend banning of the word ‘mother’ to refer to someone who has given birth to a baby.
The logic, you see, is that we are whatever sex we declare ourselves to be. So a person formerly referred to as a woman may realize that in reality he was a man, in the new sense of that word. As a man, he may become pregnant and give birth. Thus showing that it is discriminatory against such people to use a vocabulary that assumes only women can give birth.
Yes, its the age of hysteria. And not just about climate. I am afraid this thing has a long way to run, it will move to more areas of life, it will penetrate more deeply, and it will not end at all well.
“Less than a quarter of the public hear about climate change in the media at least once a month.”
Seriously? My experience is about once a minute.
The decision, cover a dance competition or the invasion of Poland. Tough one. Doubtful he flipped a coin.
This would make sense if the German invasion of Poland never actually happened but was foretold in dozens of poorly structured computer models leading to a destruction of modern society as all valuable nation resources were diverted to a nonexistent conflict.
Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope live in a fantasy world.
They imagine reporters delivering daily reports of climate dooms and disasters.
Reality intrudes and their reporters will make headlines with the utter repeated failures for climate dooms to appear.
e.g.:
What would be an accurate news report?
Headline, “World returns to a warmer life friendly conditions that has only occurred a few times during the Holocene”?
Because, truthful honest news must admit there is no emergency.