Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
How has the 'climate change controversy' been represented by
newspapers to their readerships? Let's take the American 'prestige press', that
is to say broadsheet newspapers that offer relatively in-depth reporting for
(on the whole) highly educated readers who mostly occupy the professions.
Unlike tabloid newspapers, broadsheets aim to 'inform and edify' more than
to entertain, and tend to avoid sensationalism and the overt use of rhetoric.
Imagine being a regular reader of any of the
New York Times
,the
Los Angeles
Times
,the
Washington Post
or the
Wall Street Journal
between 1988 and the
period after the third IPCC assessment report: 1988 was arguably the first
year in which anthropogenic climate change enjoyed sustained public expo-
sure as an environmental 'issue', while by 2002, the IPCC reported that few
(if any) reputable climate scientist disputed the reality of human-induced
global warming. Over 3,500 separate news stories about climate change
appeared in the four newspaper during this 14-year period and readers of
the
New York Times
would have encountered the lion's share (some 41 per
cent). Analysis of 18.4 per cent of these articles (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004)
suggests that after a two-year period (1988-90) in which climate change was
frequently said to be likely and anthropogenic in origin, over half (52.6 per
cent) of the reporting was 'balanced'. That is, it gave roughly equal attention
to arguments and evidence for and against anthropogenic climate change.
Consider, as one of the early examples of this kind of reporting, this excerpt
from a 1992
Los Angeles Times
article:
Some scientists believe - and some ice core studies seem to indicate - that
humanity's production of CO
2
is leading to a potentially dangerous over-
heating of the planet. But sceptics contend that there is no evidence that
warming exceeds the climate's natural variations.
(Abramson, 1992: A1)
Interestingly, the Boykoffs' analysis suggests that the proportion of balanced
coverage didn't vary significantly between the four otherwise different news-
papers. All increased their reporting of climate change, with peaks in 1992,
1997 and 2001-2. But all did so in a balanced way for around half of their
reports.
This commitment to balance - one of the journalistic norms I described
earlier - may seem commendable. After all, if one of science's own norms is
'organised scepticism' (Merton, 1942), then it's only right that the journalis-
tic norm of balanced reporting should, in the four newspapers in question,
have been a means for readers to learn about dissenters in the world of
climate science. What's more, contemporary climate science is, unlike some
areas of science, 'post-normal'. As Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz mem-
orably observed, it's a science in which many 'facts are uncertain, values are
in dispute, the stakes are high, and decisions are urgent' (Funtowicz and
Ravetz, 1993: 740). Given this, it may seem all the more necessary for news
providers to have ensured balance during the IPCC's formative years - those
covered in the Boykoffs' analysis.
