September 23, 2023 Friends,
These authors make the obvious point –
“… the most important story of our time.” I have no idea if direct action will
be able to mitigate climate chaos, as the climate catastrophe continues its
harrowing path around the world. Nevertheless, effective or not, I think
it is imperative to take on Exxon Mobil, one member of Big Oil. Kagiso,
Max
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/news-media-climate-emergency
The
News Media Still Must Do Better to Tell the Most Important Story of Our Time
Despite living through the hottest summer in
history, as well as wildfires, tropical storms, and rapidly warming oceans, the
news media continues to be outdone by popular culture when it comes to
elevating and explaining the climate crisis.
Sep 21, 2023 The Nation
The news media needs to stop treating climate change as a niche
topic—and start treating it as the most important story of our time.
The climate crisis has become inescapable in much of what we
see, hear, and read. Don’t Look Up spent weeks as the
most-streamed movie ever on Netflix. Pop star Billie Eilish sings about hills burning in California.
At the bookstore, climate fiction has
become a genre of its own, while Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First,
a harrowing nonfiction account of what life on a warming planet will mean, is
entering its second month on the New York Times bestseller
list.
And where is journalism in all of this? Despite living through
the hottest summer in history, as well as wildfires, tropical storms, and
rapidly warming oceans, the news media continues to be outdone by popular culture
when it comes to telling the most urgent story of our time. Inexplicably,
climate change remains a niche concern for most mainstream news outlets. Most
American TV coverage of this summer’s hellish weather did not even mention the
words “climate change,” much less explain that the burning of oil, gas, and
coal is what’s driving that hellish weather. Too many newsrooms continue to see
climate as a siloed beat of specialists.
"Every
newsroom in every community needs to think about climate change not as a beat
but as a through line involving everything we do. No corner of the newsroom is
exempt—not business or culture, not sports or city hall."
There are, of course, notable exceptions. The Guardian,
for example, has long delivered abundant science-based, comprehensive coverage
of the climate crisis as well as its solutions, as have other big global outlets
such as the AFP news agency and Al Jazeera. But those outlets, as excellent as
they often are, are among the outliers; much of the rest of media—particularly
television, which, even in today’s digital era, remains the leading source of
news globally for the largest number of people—struggle to find their climate
footing.
We wish it were otherwise. As founders of Covering Climate Now,
a global journalism collaboration formed to break the “climate silence” that
long prevailed in the media, we’ve been working to help our colleagues
throughout the news business amp up their coverage of the climate story.
In 2019, the media’s climate silence began to break, and in the
past four years, we’ve seen encouraging successes: In the United States, major
outlets including The Washington Post now treat climate change
as a subject to cover every day and not solely as a weather story. Telemundo
51, a Spanish-language TV station in Miami, is pursuing an “all of
newsroom” approach that encourages reporters on every beat to talk about
climate change, including its solutions. Overseas, France Télévisions (France’s
counterpart to Britain’s BBC) has jettisoned traditional weathercasts in favor of a daily
“weather-climate bulletin,” where viewers can track global warming in real time
as an eight-digit electronic counter shows how much today’s temperatures exceed
the preindustrial average. (As of September 12, the number was 1.19829708
degrees Celsius.)
These mold-breaking innovations are notable, but they remain
exceptions. Dramatic changes in climate have made increased news coverage of
extreme weather unavoidable. But explaining the climate connection to
extreme weather is a different task. News coverage needs to start
systematically pointing out the links between changes in the weather and the
decisions being made by industry, and government, that have overheated the
planet.
As journalists, we have to do better. The broad, general public
needs to understand what is happening, why it matters, and, above all, that
they can help fix it—for example, by voting, by not buying unsustainable
products, and by talking to friends and family about
doing the same.
Journalism is at its best when it effectively explains and
connects the dots between seemingly disparate events. That means, for instance,
learning lessons from how the media covered Covid—also a sprawling, complicated
story dictated by science. Nobody in the media debated the need to dedicate
resources to helping audiences understand Covid and then playing the story big.
Most outlets ran multiple Covid stories every day, which helped even casual
news consumers understand that something important was happening. Journalists
grounded our coverage in science, but we didn’t silo it on the science desk: We
covered Covid as a health story, a politics story, a business, education, and a
lifestyle story. And we talked not only about the problem but also about its
solutions (e.g., masking, social distancing, vaccinations).
Climate coverage could take the same approach. Every newsroom in
every community needs to think about climate change not as a beat but as a
through line involving everything we do. No corner of the newsroom is
exempt—not business or culture, not sports or city hall.
On the national level, journalism has to figure out how to make
climate change central to our politics coverage. Next year will bring elections
in the US, the UK, the European Union, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Egypt that
will have profound effects on the prospects for global climate action. Can
politics reporters and editors scale back their fixation on horse-race coverage
and instead provide the kind of coverage that voters need to make informed
choices? Election coverage should help audiences understand what the candidates
will do about the climate crisis if elected, not just what
they say. It should hold candidates accountable not by asking them (as Fox did
at the first US Republican debate last month) whether they believe in climate
change but rather, “What is your plan to deal with the climate
crisis?”
Overall, we also need much more and better coverage of climate
solutions. Our colleagues at the Solutions Journalism Network have rightly
criticized news coverage that talks only about what’s wrong. Understanding a
problem is important, of course, but telling the whole story also
requires examining how that
problem might be fixed.
What else does “more and better” climate coverage mean? We
expect some answers to emerge this week at “Climate Changes Everything:
Creating a Blueprint for Media Transformation,” a conference at the
Columbia Journalism School in New York cosponsored by Covering Climate Now; our
founders, the Columbia Journalism Review and The
Nation, our lead media partner, The Guardian; and the Solutions
Journalism Network. Reporters and editors from news outlets worldwide—large and
small, commercial and nonprofit—will chart a course for how journalists
everywhere can tackle the climate story in ways that drive attention and impact
and highlight solutions and justice. The assembled journalists will draw
lessons and inspiration from some of the best climate coverage of the past
year, as exemplified by winners of the 2023 Covering Climate Now Journalism
Awards, which were just announced. (The
conference will be livestreamed and recordings will remain available.)
With the planet on fire, more and better news coverage is itself
an essential climate solution. Only when the general public understands what is
happening, why, and what needs to be done can enough people compel governments
and corporations to change course. Many news outlets have made significant
progress in recent years. But the news industry as a whole is still not
matching the scale of the crisis with the kind of coverage that’s required.
Until that happens, journalism is letting down our readers, viewers, and
listeners—and letting Netflix and Billie Eilish handle a job that’s ours to do.
© 2023 The Nation
Mark Hertsgaard is the environmental correspondent
and investigative editor at large at The Nation and a co-founder of Covering
Climate Now. He has covered climate change since 1989, reporting from 25
countries and much of the US in his books "Earth Odyssey: Around the World
In Search of Our Environmental Future" (1999), as well as for various
outlets.
Kyle Pope is the editor and publisher of
Columbia Journalism Review.
Donations can be sent
to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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