21/09/2020

Climate Crisis: News Outlets Still Giving A Platform To Dangerous And Outdated Views

The Conversation - 

John Gomez

Author
 is Senior Lecturer in Media Psychology, University of Salford
For years, scientists have been stressing the need to act quickly and effectively on climate change. And as part of my work as a media psychology academic, I’ve seen the way media outlets along with readers have discussed climate change over the past decade.

I’ve observed very slow progress on the issue. But many news outlets do now present the climate crisis as fact rather than a matter of belief. Though given the scale of the problem, this feels like too little too late. This is why I, along many other academics and psychologists, have joined the environmental campaign group Extinction Rebellion (XR).

This group of activists have long advocated for the need to put in place policies and regulations aimed at addressing the climate emergency and breakdown. Extinction Rebellion poses three demands:
  1. Tell the truth
  2. Net zero emissions by 2025
  3. Organise Citizen Assemblies whose decisions are binding
Extinction Rebellion repeatedly claim that government and media alike are not telling the truth about the gravity and seriousness of the climate crisis. This has led to a series of recent demonstrations against mainstream media outlets calling on them to highlight the crisis and to increase their coverage of climate issues.

So just how much of an issue is press coverage of the climate crisis and are journalists going far enough in their reporting?

False balance and distortions

Back in 2007, researchers from Oxford University highlighted the barriers to accurate and consistent coverage of the climate crisis.

One of the key messages of their report was that sometimes coverage is poor not because of an intentional distortion by the media, but because of a clash between journalistic values and the need to tell the truth about the climate crisis.

Providing a balanced view is an important aspect of reporting and is highly valued by journalists. But research has found that so-called “false balance”, whereby a counter argument or expert is given on a topic where there is otherwise overwhelming consensus, can distort the public’s perceptions of what ought to be noncontroversial subjects.

The way the news is often framed (for example, whether a natural disaster is presented as an isolated incident or in the context of a large-scale phenomenon) can also lead to distortions. So can the types of images associated to climate change news – such as the iconic polar bears, or the melting ice. These images can make it seem like this is something happening far away that won’t impact most people’s lives.

Beyond consensus

I’ve spoken with Extinction Rebellion critics who argue that modern coverage of climate change no longer questions consensus. Indeed, research has found that more recently, the media does generally recognise the existence of consensus in the scientific community – and that critics of climate crisis are in a small minority.

One of the classic climate change images. FloridaStock/Shutterstock



But the study also shows how distortions still occur in the way journalists frame and interpret climate change issues and expert opinions around it. These results support previous research that analysed climate crisis coverage in British newspapers between 2007–2011. It found that uncontested sceptical voices - though in clear decline - were still present. This practice was predominant in editorials and opinion pieces in right-leaning newspapers often written by non specialist, in-house columnists.

In other words, although the mainstream media has corrected its representation of scientific consensus, a sceptic view is still delivered to readers – just via opinion pieces or editorial rather than news reporting.

This can also be seen in the BBC’s recent response to a complaint concerning the way Justin Webb, presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme, described the climate and ecological emergency as “a matter of opinion”. The complaint office responded by saying that while there is agreement on the reality and existence of man-made climate change, the “notion of there being a climate emergency is the subject of some debate”.
This is despite the fact that the UK Parliament has declared a climate emergency in response to accumulating evidence on the need to act urgently to save our planet.

Similarly, Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp papers were promoting a sceptic reading of the devastating 2019 wildfires in Australia.

Outdated views

Research on journalistic norms shows how, by and large, journalists see their role as “informing the citizenry, free from influences of government or obligations to any external force”.

But in the upcoming book, The Psychology of Journalism, that I’ve edited with my colleague Peter Bull, we explore how demands posed by the political and economic system journalists work in can affect the way in which news information is presented. And this can also influence the way people receive and respond to news.

Ultimately though, journalists can still be hesitant to adopt a “doom and gloom” approach when talking about the climate emergency. But research shows this is not the only way to talk about climate crisis – and continuing to present it as a topic to be debated is outdated and dangerous.

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(AU) Australia Cannot Wait For Climate Decision To Save Reef: Foundation

Sydney Morning Herald - Tony Moore

Australia cannot wait for the world’s politicians to agree on climate change before taking steps to protect its most famous reef from ocean warming, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation's chief executive Anna Marsden warns.

Ms Marsden said practical steps would include identifying fast-growing "super-breeder reefs" to repopulate damaged reef areas and protect threatened species.

A Raine Island green turtle after nesting. Credit: Gary Cranitch/Queensland Museum 



"I stand in front of an ecosystem that is on the frontline of a changing climate," Ms Marsden said.

"I will lose the world’s reef if I only focus on the long game.

Anna Marsden, managing director of Great Barrier Reef Foundation with green turtle hatchlings.

"We don’t have the luxury of just waiting for the world to get their act together on the climate-change mitigation front alone."

Seeing green turtle hatchlings recently enter the reef waters from the 64,000 extra turtles that made headlines in July was a start, Ms Marsden said.

"There are not many causes that land on our generation that have to be solved within our generation, so this is really the cause of our time," she said.

Great Barrier Foundation chief scientist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg believes broad-scale change on the reef must be under way in 10 years.

Ms Marsden said criticism of the federal government’s process in awarding $443 million to the foundation in 2017, subsequently reviewed by the Australian National Audit Office, encouraged it to tell its own 20-year story better.

Much of the $443 million is helping a cross-expertise program called the Reef Restoration and Adaption Program, blending experience from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, James Cook University, the CSIRO and Great Barrier Marine Park Authority.

"This is not about coral gardening, it is about rebuilding reefs," Ms Marsden said.

"It is about cracking the code of rebuilding the reefs that have been lost, protecting the reefs that are still there and doing it at scale.

"If we can crack these techniques, we can protect much of the Great Barrier Reef and arguably share this knowledge with the world."

The scientific team is trying to identify "super-breeder reefs" that can be used to repopulate the rest of the Great Barrier Reef network after coral bleaching events.

"This is what we have to crack; how do you rebuild a reef after a cyclone, or after a bleaching event," Ms Marsden said.

Raine Island green turtles arrive to nest. Credit: Gary Cranitch/Queensland Museum



About $50 million is invested in partnerships with 72 traditional reef owner groups that have custodianship over parts of the reef, similar to their Great Barrier Reef Foundation Raine Island Recovery Project.

In July, a series of steps including raising the sand levels, fencing off breeding grounds and using drones to count showed 64,000 additional green turtles arriving to breed on Raine Island off Cairns.

Some of the $443 million funding goes to programs that tackle crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks and water quality.

"But we have carved out a good chunk of the money for game-changing innovations," Ms Marsden said.

The Great Barrier Marine Foundation’s partnership management committee identified the projects.

"When you think about coral reef protection, the scale of the problem is a problem only Australia has," Ms Marsden said.

"A lot of people are doing coral restoration, but they are talking about one reef. We have thousands of reefs, so we have to scale it and make it affordable at scale."

Their five-year Raine Island Recovery Project is a success in a conventional conservation project.

"It is all part of the circle of life. In July we covered the mums and now we are reporting on the babies."

Ms Marsden said the foundation agreed the Great Barrier Reef was facing "a perfect storm of threats".

"But what this conservation project is showing is that the right blend of traditional owner, conservation, engineering and science working together can achieve that natural circle of life and give us that extra resilience boost that is weighing against so many other challenges they are facing," she said.

Ms Marsden said similar steps were being taken at Lady Elliott Island on southern Great Barrier Reef.

"The model is to get the right amount of modelling data, understand the biodiversity in the ecosystem and understand how the system has worked in peak times," she said.

"We then 'work' the problem."

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(AU) Cowardice: What Morrison And Albanese Have In Common On Climate

Sydney Morning Herald - Sean Kelly

Author
Sean Kelly is a columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald and a former adviser to Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.
In 2009, Anthony Albanese was asked how long he’d stay in Parliament if Labor lost. "Not one day. I'm out of here."

This wasn’t an admission of a dwindling devotion to politics. Eleven years later, Albanese leads his party. It was a reflection of Albanese’s recognition of the power that being in government gives you.

And, he said, there was no point in power for its own sake: “The first thing about power is that you've got to use it.” This reminded the journalist Laurie Oakes, from whose column I’m quoting, of an old piece of Labor wisdom: “You get power by exercising it.”

The seats of power ... Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese and Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen


We all learned that lesson watching Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister. Time after time, he refused to exercise the power he had. And, sure enough, power slipped away from him, in increments that accumulated over a few short years into the loss of his entire prime ministership.

Politics can be disturbingly simplistic and prejudiced. Turnbull was verbose, urbane, wealthy and handsome: weakness could be made easily to fit.

The current Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader are very different men. They speak clearly, and conform to more traditional modes of Australian masculinity.

“Weak” is not a word that conveniently matches either Scott Morrison or Anthony Albanese. Yet each, this week, shied away from using his authority, at a time of urgency for our nation.

There are various nuances around the energy announcements of recent days, but there is a simple fact, too: the Prime Minister failed us.

The beginning of this year, its hurtling fires and thickened air, gave an early taste of the harm that will be done to Australia and Australians by a hotter climate. Most of us will see worse before we die.

On Tuesday, Morrison announced he would hurry things along, by doing everything he could to get more gas out of the ground.

A sad fact about the climate debate, and particularly the mess that Tony Abbott made of it, is that we have been reduced to bleak comparisons. Everything, at this point, is fairly disastrous, but at least X is slightly less disastrous than Y.

And so, within these confines, let us note the Liberal Party, under Morrison, has over the past two years moved away from coal. Within the perverse theatre of Australian climate debate, this looks like progress. In terms of brutal reality, it’s close to meaningless.

Climate scientist Will Steffen, who has advised governments of both persuasions on climate policy, provides some sense of how bad things are. We hear a lot about the Paris Agreement. It’s best to think about this in three tiers, Steffen says.

First: the aim of the agreement is to keep temperature rises well below two degrees. There is momentum already in the system – the world will keep getting hotter for a little while no matter what we do.

If the temperature rise hits two degrees, all of the disasters that are coming our way will be more severe – more heatwaves, more severe cyclones, higher sea levels. And 99 per cent of coral reefs will die. It’s crucial to avoid hitting this point. Note that the aim is well below two degrees.

Second, having agreed to that aim, nations made commitments on what they would actually do. But these commitments are far less than what is needed to meet the aim. If that is all we do, we will likely face a temperature rise of about three degrees.

Third, countries are not even meeting these weak commitments. Australia, Steffen says, is at the worse end of this. If every country acted like Australia, temperatures might rise by close to four degrees.

In the abstract public debate, the Paris accord can seem like a series of bureaucratic targets. In reality, it is the difference between the world that we have now – already facing more fire and drought – and absolute catastrophe.

So is there a role for gas as a “transition fuel” away from coal, as the Prime Minister says? Yes, says Steffen – but that means using the gas we already have, not extracting more of it.

Illustration: John Shakespeare

If the world simply relied on all the mines and infrastructure already in place – without adding one more mine or one new gas field – we might still hit two degrees. Instead, the Prime Minister is talking about expanding our gas production, which, over decades, would be “disastrous”.

The phrase “transition fuel”, Steffen believes, is being used as a smokescreen. “That is misusing the word and concept of transition.”

It can sometimes be difficult, in politics, to draw a line between canny leadership and weakness. Is it canny, or weak, to wait for events to move, and then move with them? There’s not one answer: it depends on various factors, including how important the issue is, and how high is the cost of waiting.

Climate change is the most important challenge any government in any of our lifetimes will face, coronavirus included. And it is clear, from what Steffen says, that the costs of waiting are disastrous.

This is why Morrison’s actions should be viewed as weak. He is failing to take our country where it needs to go. He has managed a shift away from coal partly because he is trusted by his colleagues as a genuine conservative. But he has also managed it simply because time has passed; he has read the politics of the moment, including those of his own party, and gone with them.

But consider what he might have done. In political terms, he was handed not one crisis but two. He could have used the fires to argue the matter was urgent; and he could have used the pandemic to make the case that a massive expansion of green jobs was necessary.

Facing perhaps the most opportune set of circumstances in which to act on climate that any prime minister has faced, he chose not to use his authority. These are the actions of a weak leader – not so different from Turnbull.

And what about Labor, a party of the left, allegedly committed to fighting climate change, the only one of the two major parties to have passed significant legislation to cut emissions? What did Labor do this week? Went along with it, more or less. There were some questions about whether the plan was much of a plan, but there was no strong disagreement.

The truth is, Labor has pretty much given up on fighting on climate change from opposition.

Here, we quickly come to the same question we did with Morrison: canny or weak? In a sense, Albanese is staying true to his words in 2009. Government gives you power that opposition does not. To really change things, you must win government.

 Labor has clearly judged that fighting the government on climate will not help it win.

Albanese is presumably hoping that voters will tire of Morrison, and that he can win on other issues. But as with Morrison, we can talk about political strategy, but we also have the right to judge Albanese against the reality of the world: he too is acting from a position of cowardice, unwilling to give Morrison the fight he wants, unwilling to face down the gas-hounds in his own party, unwilling to take a stand on the issue of our time.

Perhaps this will prove to be a smart strategic decision; if Labor wins government, and acts on climate, it might seem worth it. But Albanese should remember, too, that “you get power by exercising it”.

And if you avoid major fights for too long, eventually people forget that you can fight at all.

This idea that voters might quickly tire of the man who led them through crisis relies to some extent on historical examples, including that of Winston Churchill. The great man lost the 1945 election after leading his country through a war.

Voters, it seemed, wanted something new. But two crucial facts to remember are that Churchill’s opponents also offered something new – and that they were given help in that mission.

In 1942 the Beveridge Report was released. That report described the “five giants” blocking the road to post-war recovery – Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness – and a comprehensive program to fight them. It was a “revolutionary moment in the world's history”, the report stated, and therefore “a time for revolutions, not for patching".

Any election result has many causes, but as some historians have pointed out, while both parties backed the Beveridge Report, Churchill hedged a little. Labour backed it completely.

In Australia, if Labor chooses not to fight on climate, at this revolutionary moment, what will it fight on?

It’s interesting to consider what might take the place of the Beveridge Report – some external force that helps shift the national mood towards accepting change, and offers concrete possibilities.

One candidate is a Joe Biden presidency. If he beats Donald Trump in November, the Democrats might, in the early months of next year, help show both Australia and Labor what is possible.

Of course, he might not win; or he might win and disappoint. But he has certainly been sharp on climate lately, calling Trump a “climate arsonist”.

This week, he could as easily have said the same of Morrison and Albanese.

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