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Poor US Media Coverage Danger

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 7 months ago

 

Vancouver Sun (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada)

Blame the media for climate woes: analysis

Mike De Souza, CanWest News Service

Published: Sunday, August 05, 2007

 

OTTAWA - Mainstream U.S. media are to blame for stalled international efforts to reach an agreement to fight climate change, according to a new analysis released by a media watchdog group.

 

The report, in the latest edition of a magazine published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, said there are multiple examples of major American media organizations watering down recent warnings from peer-reviewed scientific literature about the consequences of global warming and the human-produced pollution that is causing it.

The watchdog group based its analysis on a comparison of American and British headlines and articles about the release of a series of international reports that assessed the latest peer-reviewed on climate change.

 

"Where U.K. media generally presented climate change as an urgent crisis that requires immediate action, in the U.S. it's still widely portrayed as an unresolved debate," says the article, written by Neil deMause in the July-August edition of Extra!.

 

The coverage is helping to prop up U.S. government policies which suggest aggressive action to tackle climate change could be economically costly, deMause said. For example, he explained that many Americans were unaware of a British government study by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern that warned the cost of doing nothing would be much worse than immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

 

"The Stern report is something that has been hashed out in the British and Canadian media and argued back and forth, whereas in the U.S., nobody has heard of it," said deMause in an interview. "That's the problem. It's not particularly what stand the media takes on what should we do about climate change, it's the information is getting out about climate change, and I think that in the U.S., it's a very limited debate."

 

He added that the lack of information helps ease the pressure on the U.S. government to accept a new international climate change treaty with binding caps on greenhouse gas pollution.

 

"The worry of course is that the U.S. is the 700-pound gorilla here, and to some degree, until the U.S. starts making moves, other nations, (such as) India and China, are going to be resistant to doing any thing substantial," he said. "The U.S. really holds a lot of the cards here, aside from the fact, of course, that the U.S. is the biggest creator of carbon."

 

While the major British papers followed the release of the first 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Feb. 2 with headlines such as "Official: Global Warming is All Our Fault"; "World's Scientists Convinced That Humans Cause Global Warming"; and "Worse Than We Thought: Report Warns of 4 C Rise by 2100: Floods and food and Water Shortages Likely," American daily newspapers in major markets had less alarming headlines such as "U.N. Study Spurs Call to Fight Warming"; "From Global Warming Report, U.S. Feels Heat"; and "Science Panel Calls Global Warming Unequivocal'".

 

The analysis also noted that separate features in British papers such as the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph ran the following weekend, focusing on dangerous consequences projected in the scientific literature such as the risk of regions becoming uninhabitable and the extinction of hundreds of species. Meantime, a feature in the Chicago Tribune addressed issues such as "investments in companies likely to benefit from new, stricter environmental laws, while the New York times ran an article "noting that global warming is an unequivocal fact likely to make summers hotter and winters warmer for the next few centuries, with potentially dire consequences for the ecosystem' - then spent the next 17 paragraphs discussing the likely effect on groundhogs."

 

An organization that promotes skepticism about the theory of human-caused global warming believes that it's the British and Canadian media who are biased in their coverage.

"Media coverage in Canada on climate change been exceptionally poor with such basic mistakes it is hard to believe many are not doing this on purpose," Tom Harris, executive director of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, wrote in an e-mail. "One editor of a major Eastern Canadian newspaper told me point blank privately (which is why I can't tell you his name) that they won't give coverage to our side because they are afraid it might offend their advertisers - there was no social conscience evident there."

 

Harris, who is a former consultant at a lobbying firm that represented gas and energy companies, said large Canadian media organizations also neglected to report that the latest international assessment report had less dire projections about temperature and sea level rise than the previous report from 2001.

 

James Hoggan, a public relations consultant who set up a website, www.desmogblog. com, to debunk arguments of climate skeptics, said Canadian media are getting better at weeding out comments from industry-endorsed groups and think tanks by focusing instead on the conclusions of peer-reviewed research.

 

But Hoggan, whose clients include David Suzuki's environmental foundation, said many reporters still have work to do when it comes to explaining the basics of climate change science.

 

"Only a very small percentage of Canadians would associate climate change with heat-trapping gases, but a greater percentage of Canadians might (incorrectly) associate it with something like aerosol cans or the hole in the ozone. Canadians also may think it has something to do with the heat that's generated by factories or machines."

 

He said he's also starting to worry about companies and politicians that are claiming to be taking action to fight climate change when in reality, they aren't really doing anything.

He said his blog will start to pay more attention to these issues, with a particular focus on U.S. policy and developments in the fall.

 

© CanWest News Service

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