Guest contribution by Eric Worrall
The legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow, as is well known, provided live reports on German tanks crossing the Polish border. Columbia Journalism Review believes that journalists today should follow suit and stand up to their editors in reporting from the frontlines of climate change.
Why can’t we call it an emergency?
By Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope
3 JUNE 2021
TV NEWSMAN BILL MOYERS likes to tell the story of how Edward R. Murrow, the preeminent US broadcast journalist of his day, insisted on covering the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Murrow’s bosses at CBS News had different priorities; they ordered Murrow’s reporters to cover dance competitions in Hamburg, Paris, and London, and stated that Americans needed good news. Murrow wouldn’t do it. “That will probably fire us,” he told his colleagues, but sent his correspondents to the German-Polish border; they arrived just in time to see Hitler’s tanks and troops roar in Poland. Suddenly Europe was at war. And the Americans heard about it because journalists from one of the most influential news agencies in the country defied convention and did their job.
All of humanity is under attack today, this time from an overheated planet – and too many newsrooms are still more inclined to cover today’s equivalent of dance competitions. The record heat waves and storms of 2020 confirmed what scientists have long been predicting: climate change is underway and an unprecedented catastrophe looms. And because carbon dioxide has been trapping heat in the atmosphere for centuries, the temperature rise and its effects are only just beginning. One scientist said when forest fires stained the San Francisco sky orange last September, “We’ll look back in 10 years, certainly in 20 … and say : ‘Wow, 2020 was a crazy year, but I miss it. “
A handful of large newspapers are paying attention. But most reporting, especially on television, continues to underestimate climate history because they see it as too complicated, daunting, or controversial. Last month we asked the world press to commit to treating climate change as the emergency that scientists say. her reaction was disheartening.
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That message is muted at best today, and the outcome is predictable. In the United States, according to polls by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communications (a member of the CCNow consortium), only 26 percent of the public are “concerned” about climate change. A reason why? Less than a quarter of the population hears about climate change in the media at least once a month.
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Read more: https://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/climate-emergency-statement.php
There’s a reason newsrooms stop reporting on the “climate crisis”. Most of the material that climate activists want newsrooms to print is actually not news.
“Glacier to melt in 50 years” – that makes your heart beat faster? Glaciers melting in the next year would be much more interesting, but short-term predictions carry significant risks. In 2019, Glacier National Park had to quietly remove its “Gone by 2020” signs after the glaciers did not melt as planned.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes provides an excellent explanation as to why climate news is not getting more attention;
almost without exception. Every time we have reported about it, it has been a tangible rating killer. So the incentives are not great.
– Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 24, 2018
Did anyone notice a few weeks ago when a 1,600 square mile iceberg broke off the Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica? Of course not. Large icebergs happen from time to time, they do not affect anyone’s life to any significant degree. This iceberg is unlikely to show up anywhere interesting. What happens in Antarctica stays in Antarctica.
Far more relevant and interesting are events that actually affect people’s daily lives, such as attempts to pressure city politicians to do some of the road maintenance they have promised.
Hayes pointed out that people’s interest in climate change increases when other events occur, such as when a large wildfire threatens people’s homes somewhere. Major fires are an opportunity for activist journalists to smuggle in some climate messages, because a major disaster is an opportunity to make climate change relevant. But interest in climate change quickly fades after the fire is contained.
There is one aspect of the climate crisis that is always newsworthy and that the WUWT will continue to draw attention to: all the politicians who want to exploit people’s fear of climate change to pass on their economically devastating major state blindness, and the scientists, the cover provide for the politicians with their Evidence-Lite models.
A rise in taxes or the public deficit this year is far more important to most people than an empty hype about events that could happen in 50 years. Who cares about a big iceberg when your job security is at risk?
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