Changing climate or lopsided landscape?

Posted Jul 30, 2008 10:41pm

It’s been dubbed “climate-porn” and those who partake are “warmaholics”, but is the coverage of today’s most hotly contested issue really that extreme?

Climate change stories have dominated news bulletins, but now journalists themselves are feeling the heat following yet further allegations of press bias.

In an opinion piece in The Courier-Mail a Townsville based academic took a swipe at the practices employed by journalists when reporting on climate change.

“In article after article on global warming the bulk of the text and the authorities quoted are concerned with one alarmist cause or another,” said Professor Bob Carter.

A geologist and climate change researcher at James Cook University, Professor Carter writes extensively on the role the media plays in the climate change debate and submitted the following assessment to a U.S. Senate committee on environmental and public works.

“It is clear that the press is not good at providing insightful commentaries about matters neither of complex environmental science, nor at balancing different views, or at accepting criticism of their efforts.”

In the submission he also outlined his opposition to the long held journalistic practice of ‘balanced reporting’ when covering climate change.

“Unfortunately, though taught in every journalism school, this technique is a travesty when applied to matters of science,” he said.

“It’s a simplistic view which journalists seem to learn at their mother’s knee, that a ‘balanced’ account of a controversial issue is achieved by recognising that there are two sides to the debate.”

He said in the real world there were not just two sides to the global warming issue. Rather, there were almost as many sides to the debate as there were expert scientists arguing it.

Christopher Warren, the Federal Secretary of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, believes Carter’s work has become a standard attack on the media for reporting views that he doesn't agree with.

While he acknowledges there may be significant criticisms that could be made of the manner in which journalists have handled the challenge of reporting global warming, Warren says Carter’s scepticisms are well known.

“His commenting on how the media has been reporting global warming reflects more his personal views than it does any genuine research work on the manner in which the media has handled this issue.”

“A more significant criticism that can be made of the way in which the media reports on global warming is that we have brought the sort of get-both-sides approach of political reporting to what are scientific issues.”

Although Carter faces his own share of sceptics, his position has some support.

U.S. academic, Dr Christopher Lingle, recently wrote in the Japan Times: “reporting on issues relating to global warming has become strikingly one-sided.”

“There are signs of a growing intolerance in the debate on global climate change. Climate change denial has become a taboo that invites a sense of moral repugnance toward deniers,” he said.

Professor Carter agrees, saying it is a typical semantic confusion of journalists and editors as to whether climate change was really happening.

“This is not and never has been the case, the climate is always changing. The current debate is not about whether the climate is changing, but rather do human emissions of carbon dioxide cause dangerous global warming,” he says.

He says the issue goes deeper, citing journalists who were not adequately trained in science, nor had the ability or self-confidence to critically assess the climate change issue.

“Public broadcasters’ coverage of the global warming issue indicates their staff do not understand the difference between sound empirical science and the virtual realities of speculative computer modeling,” he says.

Lingle agrees: “citing computer model forecasts to justify scientific consensus about climate change, beggars logic and denies real-world experience. As it is, weather forecasters and economists using similarly elaborate computer models are legendarily inept in making short term predictions.”

However, senior Brisbane journalist and environmental reporter for The Courier-Mail, Brian Williams, argues: “the media is hardly going to be debating the nitty-gritty of high level computer modeling and so on.”

“Surely this is material that should be thrashed out by publications such as Nature and New Scientist, with appropriately qualified scientists contributing? The average person reading a newspaper or sitting in front of TV would struggle to grasp many of the science arguments,” he said.

Williams, a thirty-year journalism veteran, says Carter was right in his general thrust that naysayers such as himself do not get as good a run in the media as other officials such the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change.

“But what is the media to do, censor the thousands of scientists saying one thing and go with a relative handful of those with another view?” Williams says.

“As a working journalist I am swamped with pro climate change material pretty much every day of the week, which perhaps explains the sheer volume of this material.”

“When reporting I tend to use reputable organisations such as the CSIRO for an impartial view.”

“Nevertheless, if Carter comes up with some new research debunking climate change, I’m dead keen to publish it,” he says.

Professor Carter says he and like-minded researchers have not been sufficiently reported in the media, a quick search through the story libraries of The Courier-Mail and The Sunday Mail suggests otherwise.

According to research conducted by Williams, Carter’s views have been aired in these publications and on its website 14 times.

Incidentally, to put climate change coverage into some context for Queensland, The Courier-Mail and The Sunday Mail have published 2,394 stories from briefs to feature articles on these topics since 1984.

“If you divided up publication space on a percentage basis; that is the sheer number of scientists who agree with climate change versus those against, it may well be that Carter and others of his view have proportionately received a better run,” Williams says.

“Having said that, some of the things he says are obviously right, such as, the fact that we always have and always will have climate change. I just hope he’s right that we have not contributed to it.”

Related Links

• Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance
• Professor Bob Carter
• The Courier-Mail