[greenyes] Analysis of US Media Blackout on Climate Disruption

["Peter Anderson" <anderson@no.address>]

MotherJones.com / News / Feature

Snowed
Though global climate change is breaking out all around us, the U.S. news 
media has remained silent.

Ross Gelbspan
May/June 2005 Issue WHEN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA was inundated by a foot of 
rain, several feet of snow, and lethal mudslides earlier this year, the news 
reports made no mention of climate change-even though virtually all climate 
scientists agree that the first consequence of a warmer atmosphere is a 
marked increase in extreme weather events. When four hurricanes of 
extraordinary strength tore through Florida last fall, there was little 
media attention paid to the fact that hurricanes are made more intense by 
warming ocean surface waters. And when one storm dumped five feet of water 
on southern Haiti in 48 hours last spring, no coverage mentioned that an 
early manifestation of a warming atmosphere is a significant rise in severe 
downpours.

Though global climate change is breaking out all around us, the U.S. news 
media has remained silent. Not because climate change is a bad story-to the 
contrary: Conflict is the lifeblood of journalism, and the climate issue is 
riven with conflict. Global warming policy pits the United States against 
most of the countries of the world. It's a source of tension between the 
Bush administration and 29 states, nearly 100 cities, and scores of activist 
groups working to reduce emissions. And it has generated significant and 
acrimonious splits within the oil, auto, and insurance industries. These 
stories are begging to be written.

And they are being written-everywhere else in the world. One academic thesis 
completed in 2000 compared climate coverage in major U.S. and British 
newspapers and found that the issue received about three times as much play 
in the United Kingdom. Britain's Guardian, to pick an obviously liberal 
example, accorded three times more coverage to the climate story than the 
Washington Post, more than twice that of the New York Times, and nearly five 
times that of the Los Angeles Times. In this country, the only consistent 
reporting on this issue comes from the New York Times' Andrew Revkin, whose 
excellent stories are generally consigned to the paper's Science Times 
section, and the Weather Channel-which at the beginning of 2004 started 
including references to climate change in its projections, and even hired an 
on-air climate expert.

Why the lack of major media attention to one of the biggest stories of this 
century? The reasons have to do with the culture of newsrooms, the misguided 
application of journalistic balance, the very human tendency to deny the 
magnitude of so overwhelming a threat, and, last though not least, a 
decade-long campaign of deception, disinformation, and, at times, 
intimidation by the fossil fuel lobby to keep this issue off the public 
radar screen.

The carbon lobby's tactics can sometimes be heavy-handed; one television 
editor told me that his network had been threatened with a withdrawal of oil 
and automotive advertising after it ran a report suggesting a connection 
between a massive flood and climate change. But the most effective campaigns 
have been more subtly coercive. In the early 1990s, when climate scientists 
began to suspect that our burning of coal and oil was changing the earth's 
climate, Western Fuels, then a $400 million coal cooperative, declared in 
its annual report that it was enlisting several scientists who were 
skeptical about climate change-Patrick Michaels, Robert Balling, and S. Fred 
Singer-as spokesmen. The coal industry paid these and a handful of other 
skeptics some $1 million over a three-year period and sent them around the 
country to speak to the press and the public. According to internal strategy 
papers I obtained at the time, the purpose of the campaign was "to 
reposition global warming as theory (not fact)," with an emphasis on 
targeting "older, less educated males," and "younger, low-income women" in 
districts that received their electricity from coal, and who preferably had 
a representative on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The Western Fuels campaign was extraordinarily successful. In a Newsweek 
poll conducted in 1991, before the spin began, 35 percent of respondents 
said they "worry a great deal" about global warming. By 1997 that figure had 
dropped by one-third, to 22 percent.

Then as now, a prime tactic of the fossil fuel lobby centered on a clever 
manipulation of the ethic of journalistic balance. Any time reporters wrote 
stories about global warming, industry-funded naysayers demanded equal time 
in the name of balance. As a result, the press accorded the same weight to 
the industry-funded skeptics as it did to mainstream scientists, creating an 
enduring confusion in the public mind. To this day, many people are unsure 
whether global warming is real.

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