Columbia Journalism Review - Rosalind Donald
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| The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, in the Mojave Desert. Photo via Climate Visuals. |
Ten years ago, climate journalist Brian Kahn watched coverage of the United Nations
Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. At the time, the momentum
seemed unstoppable. There were negotiations over a
global framework for tackling climate change. Climate scientists’ conclusions in
reports
leading up to the meeting were stark and urgent. He felt the dam would
break, and climate change would be everywhere: in political debate, in
bars, at PTA meetings, certainly on the news.
Now he can’t imagine what he was thinking.
Coverage by climate journalists
has never spurred a comprehensive social response, nor has it reshaped
journalism itself. We now better recognize the difficulties of
communicating climate change, but it still gets scant attention and
resources in newsrooms. Many
outlets still insist on
false balance, in which fringe views are presented on a par with the more established scientific consensus.
“The timeframe in which science
happens and the timeframe in which news happens are just fundamentally
mismatched,” Susan Matthews, Slate’s science editor, says. “That problem
is just so much larger when it comes to climate change.”
Climate change is an
economic story and a
public health story; global warming shapes
supply chains,
water resources,
tech infrastructure,
community development and
loss,
and on and on. Yet climate coverage has historically been relegated to
the science and environmental beats, outside the realm of hard news.
“There’s
a feeling still amongst a certain generation of editor that being an
environmental journalist is a bit campaigner-y,” Leo Hickman, editor of
Carbon Brief, a publication focused on explaining climate science and
policy says. “And that’s reinforced the ghettoization of climate change
as a subsection of environmental journalism.” (Disclosure: I previously
worked for Carbon Brief.)
It’s both an environmental issue and an
everything issue. It’s what’s going to happen to mountain goats, but at
the end of the day we’re also talking about the most pressing economic
story of our time.
That perception of climate coverage
has only started to shift. Science and environmental journalists have
looked for new angles on climate change in order to demonstrate its
impacts in ways that appeal to new audiences. Kahn, now a senior
reporter for Gizmodo’s
Earther
and a lecturer in the Climate and Society program at Columbia
University’s Earth Institute, covers classic climate science stories
such as new
research and threats to beloved
species, but also looks at the implications of US cities’
climate policies, climate discussions in the
presidential race, and the ways
inequality dramatically exacerbates the impacts of extreme weather.
“Climate change is a strange kind of
dual issue—it’s both an environmental issue and an everything issue,”
Kahn says. “It’s what’s going to happen to mountain goats, but at the
end of the day we’re also talking about the most pressing economic story
of our time.”
Journalists outside the science and
environment beats are slowly beginning to pick up on climate stories. In
2017, the Carbon Disclosure Project
released a report
attributing more than 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions to
just 100 companies. Sara Law, CDP North America’s Vice President of
Global Initiatives, says journalists picked up the news as a business
story. “More and more journalists are understanding that the corporate
world has a major role to play,” Law says.
Still,
research shows the overall volume of climate coverage remains thin, and mainstream coverage is episodic. Last year, an
analysis of news coverage following two key climate reports in
CJR showed a lack of sustained attention from US news media; big spikes in reporting fell away almost immediately. And a
study
by Media Matters for America showed that coverage of climate change on
ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox—primary sources of news for most people—fell by
45 percent between 2017 and 2018.
James Painter, a research associate
at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, says other parts
of the world also fail to cover climate change as much as he would hope.
“It is worrying that in some parts of the world, like Russia and parts
of eastern Europe, and in parts of the global south, the amount of
coverage remains relatively low,” he says. “Television is key, as it
remains the most trusted and used source in many countries.”
Environmental journalists identify a
few popular impediments to climate-change coverage. Last year, more than
500 members of the Society of Environmental Journalists completed
a survey
by George Mason’s Center for Climate Change Communication. Of those
respondents, two-thirds identified insufficient time for field reporting
as an obstacle, and more than half identified a lack of time or space
at their new outlet. Forty-one percent said insufficient training in
climate science hampered their reporting, and one-in-four respondents
said they lacked support from management.
Climate Matters in the Newsroom—a new collaborative program run by the grant-funded
Climate Communication
nonprofit, George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change
Communication, and Climate Central—hosts in-person training sessions to
help local newsrooms work through obstacles such as those flagged in the
SEJ survey. “It’s not always about creating another story,” Susan
Hassol, Climate Communication’s director, says. “It may be about
incorporating climate change into a piece you’re already doing. So
people are reading and hearing stories they are interested in, and they
can see how climate change relates to those topics, even though they may
not necessarily be seeking out a climate change story.”
Climate-change coverage can seem
repetitive. Journalists too often fit new events into existing
narratives—something Andrew Revkin, who has covered climate change for
ProPublica and
The New York Times, terms “
narrative capture.”
Stories that link extreme weather and climate change can overlook other
relevant factors; Revkin mentions the California wildfires, and notes
the role that
development played in contributing to damage and loss.
“You have to have a systems approach
to thinking, ‘Well, what actually happened here?’” Revkin says. “But
when you do that, it misses the narrative that everything that’s burning
or flooding is global warming.”
Since Elizabeth Kolbert’s influential
New Yorker feature, “
The Siege of Miami,” national outlets regularly cover the city’s vulnerability to rising seas and the
hubris of its building boom. But they pay less attention to the climate-related
policies the city is putting in place, including a
resilience strategy that includes a commitment to address
affordable housing.
“These narratives tend to miss resilience efforts—which are just
getting started and are not always well-run, but still, they’re
happening,” Kate Stein, a climate reporter based in Miami, says.
Homogeneous newsrooms are
particularly vulnerable to narrative capture. “Imagine how much more
informative the media landscape would be if newsrooms stopped simply
hiring in their own image,” Leah Cowan, a writer for
gal-dem,
a British magazine written by women and non-binary people of color,
says. “So often, analysis of critical issues such as climate change are
rooted in a particular ethnocentric and Eurocentric perspective.”
Cowan cites the UK’s role in the
global climate crisis, which stems from a history of extractive
colonialism and continues through entities such as
UK-traded fossil-fuel companies
operating across Africa, as an example. Rather than thinking about how
empire and its legacies continue to drive the climate crisis, Cowan
says, the media tend to focus on “individual actions to combat
environmental degradation, such as high-profile campaigns to
reduce single-use plastic straws
in the UK which are harmful to turtles,” while ignoring or misreporting
efforts by minority-led groups such as Black Lives Matter to call
attention to the ways privilege protects some people from climate
change’s effects. As companies continue to make money out of the
spotlight in regions vulnerable to climate impacts and political unrest,
the UK—which does not count offshore emissions in its
carbon emissions totals—holds itself up as an international climate leader.
People just don’t think it’s normal to talk
about climate change, and that’s not just true of journalists. It’s true
across society.
Science, the bedrock of climate
journalism, also suffers from structural biases. “Science can can be
just as extractive as any other kind of industry,” Brentin Mock, a staff
writer at
CityLab, says. For example, Hawaii’s thin air is particularly conducive to both stargazing and measuring
atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. But Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, volcanoes which house NASA- and NOAA-constructed research facilities, are
sacred areas
for native Hawaiians, who have objected to the sites’ expansion since
their creation in the 1960s. Should optimal conditions for observation
take priority over thousands of years of cultural connection? How might
scientists work with
traditional ecological knowledge while showing it appropriate
respect? More journalists might ask such questions of scientists. And, as journalism scholar Dr. Candis Callison wrote
earlier this year, learning from and hiring indigenous journalists could help their efforts.
Discussions about climate-change
journalism often overlook newsrooms’ visual vocabularies for talking
about it. A quick image search on Google for “climate change” reveals a
dismal selection of lone polar bears, melting ice, and anonymous smoke.
But humans need to see themselves in the climate change story in order
understand the human connection to its causes, consequences, and
potential solutions, Dr. Adam Corner, Research Director at Climate
Outreach and an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Psychology,
Cardiff University, argues.
Climate Visuals,
an image repository co-founded by Corner, provides hundreds of pictures
for use, with explanations based on research about why certain images
might connect with audiences.
“There’s no shortage of amazing
climate and energy photography out there, but it doesn’t get the
mainstream bandwidth,” he says. “A more diverse, human-focused visual
language that joins the dots between climate impacts, our health and
wellbeing, and the human impact of low-carbon technologies would
revolutionize the visual meaning of climate change.”
Collaborations such as such as Mother Jones’
Climate Desk and
The Invading Sea,
a joint effort from four Florida news outlets, have opened up new
avenues for reporting as cash-strapped news organizations search for
ways to share expertise. By pooling efforts, outlets can complement each
other’s strengths: specialty outlets such as
Inside Climate News have time and space to do deep dives into data, science, and policy;
Earth Journalism Network offers a global platform to climate reporting from around the world; national newspapers such as the
Times can invest in specialized
climate desks
and have an unmatched ability to set the agenda for discussion; many
local outlets enjoy high levels of trust from their audiences.
Climate change is not yet what sociologists call a “
social fact.”
Silence is still the norm,
even among people who say they accept that climate change is happening.
“People just don’t think it’s normal to talk about climate change, and
that’s not just true of journalists,” Dr. Alice Bell, a writer and
co-director at 10:10 Climate Action, says. “It’s true across society.”
Journalism too often reflects and reinforces this problem of silence,
abetting years of lackluster policy debate and ever-rising emissions.
But journalists should not underestimate their role in helping to change
that landscape, no matter their beat.
“It’s really hard to say that this is
something you should care about as much as affordable housing, as much
as national security,” Alex Harris, the
Miami Herald’s
climate change reporter, says. “But it affects each and every one of
those things. So if you’re doing a service to your beat—no matter what
you write about, nationally or locally—if you are including this
context, it makes you smarter.”
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