Columbia Journalism Review - Kyle Pope
Reporters covering the climate crisis must be more than stenographers of tragedy
| Kyle Pope is the editor in chief and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review. |
Journalism has always been
good at fast. The home team won. An old woman was shot. A president was
elected. The quicker a story moves, the more compressed the drama, the
better we are at reporting it.
Slow is harder. Stories that contain subtlety, that
evolve, that don’t have an ending—those aren’t our strength. Racism,
systemic poverty, the long-term effects of outdated policy—these are
subjects that we’ve consistently failed to get our arms around. We chase
the immediate, the ephemeral, and ignore the seismic, the fundamental.
The reasons are understandable. Reporting on an event is
easier than becoming deeply immersed, over time, in complex characters
and bureaucracies. On television, time is tight; in print, space is
limited. The gratification in quick hits is shallow but fast. Over the
past decade, the encroachment of social media has caused newsroom
budgets and attention spans to shrink. Often, clicks replace our
consciences as the arbiters of news.
That’s also inexcusable. No longer is the value of news in
saying what happened yesterday. (We’ve got Twitter for that.) The task
at hand is to examine events carefully and deeply—to think of a moment
not in isolation, but as part of a broader context. When, last year,
California was overwhelmed by wildfires, only 3 percent of TV news
reports mentioned that climate change might have had something to do
with the intensity of the damage. For the most part, reporters were mere
stenographers of tragedy.
I am convinced that journalism’s failure to properly
report the climate story will be recorded as one of its great
humiliations. Since 1988, when James Hansen, a scientist at NASA, sat before Congress and warned the United States of the effects of a
warming planet, news organizations have dithered and delayed and put off
critical reporting on what’s happening to the earth. They have allowed
themselves to be spun by oil industry PR campaigns, convinced themselves
that the science is complicated and contested (it’s not), and rested on
the idea that the subject is too abstract and depressing for their
audiences to handle (again, false).
The result has been a massive media
fail: In 2012, researchers at Media Matters found that US news
organizations gave forty times more coverage to the Kardashians than to
rising sea levels. During the 2016 campaign, reporters neglected to ask a
single climate question in the three presidential debates. In 2018,
broadcast news outlets gave more airtime to the royal baby than to the
warming earth.
In the fall of 2019, however, we began to
see things shift. The climate story seemed to be moving from slow to
fast, as the effects of the crisis were becoming impossible for even the
most stubborn newsrooms to ignore. Floods in Venice and droughts in
India were ready-made for the evening news. Devastating fires in
California and Australia led news broadcasts around the world. Mass
protests and their student leaders adorned magazine covers. By the time
Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old climate activist, faced the United
Nations at its Climate Action Summit, in New York City, and asked “How
dare you?” the world, and its news media, were listening.
At this late hour there has, finally, been an awakening in
journalism to the grim reality of climate change. The question now is
how to tell the story. Can we ensure that the disasters we watch unfold
are contextualized and explained? Will we hold the villains of the
crisis accountable? Are we able to write about solutions to problems
without trivializing them? How can we be fast
and slow? The
matter of whether or not the climate story should be told is settled: we
must. This issue of CJR is focused on ways of doing the job.
A year ago, frustrated by journalism’s persistent silence on the fate of the natural world, CJR teamed up with
The Nation to launch Covering Climate Now, an initiative to encourage more and better climate coverage.
The Guardian
quickly signed up as our first media partner. Together, we set out to
understand why news outlets weren’t doing more—and to help them improve.
We tried to keep our initial request modest. We knew that
few newsrooms had money in the budget to add climate reporters, and we
understood that the complexity of the story—slow versus fast—was working
against us. So our ask was simple: we wanted newsrooms to commit to
upping their game for a week, stretching themselves to do more climate
reporting than they would normally, and then report back to us on what
they learned.
We debuted in April, led by Mark Hertsgaard, my partner on
the initiative and now Covering Climate Now’s executive director. We
targeted the second week of September, during the UN Climate Action
Summit, for the coverage experiment. Over the spring and summer, we
talked to editors and reporters representing newsrooms from around the
world. We learned that there was a wide consensus that more coverage was
needed—few journalists (outside the right-wing echo chamber) were in
denial about the importance of the climate story. Staffers, young ones
in particular, had long been pushing their organizations to do more.
But news outlets still held back, for three main reasons.
First, there was a pernicious view, particularly in television, that
reporting on the climate story was a political act that could turn off
conservative audiences. Second, newsrooms were convinced that they
simply didn’t have the staff to do more climate coverage at a time when
core beats—police, courts, city hall—go uncovered. And third, reporters
simply did not know where to start: they lacked training that would help
them interpret climate science, they struggled to find local angles to
global narratives, or they didn’t see how to connect climate change to
the stories they already follow every day.
On the first point, we hoped that CJR’s endorsement—and
the fact that mainstream organizations like CBS News were involved in
the effort—could provide cover for newsroom managers worried about how
their climate reporting would be perceived. On the resource question, we
never asked anyone to add to their payroll. Instead, we encouraged them
to rethink their existing beats, to make everyone in the newsroom a
climate journalist—from those on the news desk to sports to business to
culture. The last concern—that news organizations, even large ones,
didn’t know where to begin—seemed at first depressing, but then gave us
hope. If they were ill-equipped to tell the most important story of our
time, we would provide them with tools.
Our modest start—a plea for attention—yielded astonishing
results. On the appointed week in September, more than three hundred
news organizations participated in Covering Climate Now, including some
of the most widely read in the world. Together, they published or
broadcast more than 3,600 stories for a combined audience of more than a
billion people. According to Google Trends, climate searches that
September were the highest they had been in Google’s history. Since
then, the number of our partners has grown past four hundred, and their
combined audience approaches two billion people. We are just beginning
to build a network capable of informing the world that it’s not too late
to save ourselves.
We are just beginning to build a network capable of informing the world that it’s not too late to save ourselves.
Our hope
is that this magazine can begin to supply some answers about what’s
needed for climate journalism to be effective. We hear from
Emily Atkin,
a climate reporter who felt constrained by traditional forms of
storytelling (“It was difficult to hide my sense of alarm,” she
explains), and
Michael Specter, a writer who believes in the ability of facts to convey the severity of the crisis.
E. Tammy Kim reports from the Doomsday Clock–setting convention of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which may be the only publication, she writes, “to cover climate change with an approach that is explicitly existential.”
Alexandria Neason
goes back to her childhood home in Hawai‘i, where well-intentioned
climate journalism focuses on tourists and ignores indigenous people.
Betsy Morais,
CJR’s managing editor and the guiding force behind the magazine, writes
about the difficulties—and opportunities—for reporting on the climate
in China, where, as the coronavirus reminds us, censorship is rife. I
talk to
George Miller, the director of
Mad Max, about what reporters can learn from movies when it comes to crafting climate stories. Elsewhere in the issue, we
trace climate journalism across Alaska,
shadow a fire reporter in California, and
lament the ubiquity of the polar bear as a climate change mascot.
Clearly, the climate crisis can’t be contained in a single
issue of this, or any, magazine. But we can use this occasion to survey
the work being done and to consider how we can do better. It’s as good
an expression of CJR’s mission as there is.
We also have worked to produce a magazine
that takes its subject matter to heart. If you are holding this issue
in print, you are reading it on 100 percent recycled postconsumer stock.
The inks we’ve used are vegetable- and soy-based. Allied Printing, the
company we’ve hired to produce the magazine, has a zero-carbon
footprint; nearly three-quarters of the energy used at its facility
comes from wind and solar power. To further minimize our climate impact,
we’ve elected to print half the number of issues we typically would,
which helps us offset the costs of eco-friendly printing and
distribution. We have also made every effort possible to reduce travel
for our writers and photographers.
We have reached a turning point for journalism and the
planet. Old ideas that had dampened our attention to climate change—that
the subject was too polarizing or too complicated or a money-loser—have
been proven wrong. Old forms of storytelling—fast, without helping
readers draw crucial connections—are not what’s needed to confront the
crisis we face. We owe it to our audience, and our conscience, to be
more thoughtful. Climate change is the story of our time. Journalism
will be judged by how it chronicles the devastating reality.
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