news media

Last week the Museum hosted an energetic discussion about the role of the media in public understanding of climate change. Moderator Bud Ward, of the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, asked a panel of journalists to consider what they’d learned from decades covering global warming. “Let’s assume that journalists didn’t do a flawless job,” he asked. “What have we learned?”

Much of the response focused on how the issue has long been politicized, with the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin pointing out many people benefited, and that the Bush administration was a great target. “But this masked the underlying story,” said Revkin, describing it as “energy, energy, energy. Climate is a symptom of this much larger problem,” he continued. “Current energy choices do not remotely match what the world will need in 2050 to give nine billion people reasonable lives—and there’s nothing on the table.” Nor do most Americans seem inclined to rise to the challenge. Despite signs of progress like the box-office success of An Inconvenient Truth, a survey conducted last April by the Pew Research Council showed that less than half of Americans understand that pollution is causing the earth to warm. We’re also out of step with the international community, “where climate change is a major part of the Green platform,” as American University professor Matthew Nisbet pointed out. “Here the two-party system polarizes the debate, with most Republicans rejecting the idea that climate change is real, and most Democrats relegating it to a second- or third-tier policy issue.”

One reason global warming is easily viewed through a partisan lens is because it’s still pretty abstract for most of us. Panelists were optimistic that more targeted media coverage could change that. “It’s a political issue, like many others,” said ABC News reporter Bill Blakemore, “but it's a remarkably transformative event story, a foreign relations story, a trade story...The challenge is defining the new ‘beat.’” Ward concurred: “This story has to get off the science desk. Show me a beat that doesn’t have some connection to climate.” And Nisbet had a bunch of practical suggestions for reframing the issue to emphasize the local and the personal: as a moral and ethical and imperative, through a story on a local religious group; from an economic perspective, through a story about a local green-energy initiative; as a public-health story, but relocated from the poles to the suburbs. “The public should see climate change as a major political and personal priority, and see ways that they can act.”

What media source do you trust to give you the real scoop on climate change?