DEFINING SCIENCE

Out of Balance

Newspapers Are Finally Getting Climate Change Right

Appearing recently on NBC’s Today Show, climate change icon Al Gore articulated an oft-heard criticism of how media organizations cover controversial science in general and global warming in particular. Asked to respond to the writings of a prominent climate contrarian by host Meredith Viera, Gore replied in part:

But, Meredith, part of the challenge the news media has had in covering this story is the old habit of taking the “on the one hand, on the other hand” approach. There are still people who believe that the Earth is flat, but when you’re reporting on a story like the one you’re covering today, where you have people all around the world, you don’t take—you don’t search out for someone who still believes the Earth is flat and give them equal time.

Gore’s core concern here is a familiar one. It has been applied to science coverage of issues ranging from evolution to the relationship between abortion and breast cancer (for further elaboration see here and here). Ironically, though, when it comes to reporting on global warming in the United States, “phony media balance,” though once a serious problem, actually appears to have declined. And—the ironies continue—Gore himself is probably a major part of the reason for this shift.

Coverage from 1988 through 2002 in top U.S. papers, the Boykoffs found, had been “informationally biased.”

The evidence that Gore needn’t worry so much—that, in fact, he may be “flogging a dead norm”—arrives via a new paper from media scholar Maxwell T. Boykoff, which has just appeared in the journal AREA, a publication of the U.K. Royal Geographical Society. But before we explore its intriguing results, it helps to rehash the intellectual history underlying this latest research.

It was the very same Boykoff, working with his brother Jules in 2004, who published a kind of Ur-text for criticism of media coverage of global warming in the journal Global Environmental Change. Coverage from 1988 through 2002 in top U.S. papers, the Boykoffs found, had been “informationally biased”—privileging “balanced” accounts despite an ever-strengthening scientific consensus about the human role in climate change. Or more specifically, 52 percent of a random sample of articles published during this period in the U.S. “prestige press”—the Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal—had a broadly “balanced” structure. With this research, the Boykoffs provided empirical data strongly supportive of the concern articulated by Gore and many other science defenders.

But now, says Max Boykoff in his more recent paper (which covers the period from 2003 to 2006), that troublesome pattern of coverage has declined markedly. The years 2005 and 2006, in particular, saw not only a huge surge in U.S. media attention to climate change at these same papers, but also a decrease in “balanced” (as in biased) coverage, to the point that the papers were no longer significantly out of whack with scientific consensus. One focusing event that seemed instrumental here? The May 2006 release of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Boykoff’s new paper—structured as a compare-and-contrast of coverage patterns at leading U.S. and U.K. dailies—is crammed with fascinating information about how the press has covered what may be the most important issue facing humankind. Reading it helps us understand why U.S. climate reporting changed for the better, and thus imparts some key lessons about how our media can be expected to cover future science controversies.

Consider, for example, that even though Boykoff studied the five aforementioned U.S. papers but only three U.K. ones—The Guardian, The Independent, and the Times of London—he found that the U.K. papers not only never suffered from the “balance” problem, but they wrote more than twice as many total stories as the U.S. ones (although total coverage increased markedly in both nations over the course of the four-year period studied). That’s a staggering gap, and it suggests that U.S. news outlets have served us poorly indeed. But why did this occur?

We had a much more influential denial machine, but also a scientific establishment that failed to take it on.

As you might expect, U.S. and U.K .media saw different but to some extent overlapping focal events, which apparently contributed both to rising coverage levels and (in the United States) to a decrease in phony “balanced” coverage. The 2006 Stern Report on the economics of addressing climate change made a much bigger splash in the U.K.; but here, Hurricane Katrina drove dramatic attention to global warming. In both countries, An Inconvenient Truth had a big impact. However, the individual events, taken by themselves, don’t seem capable of explaining why it is that at least until 2005 and 2006, the U.S. and U.K. media diverged so greatly.

Instead, and in my view correctly, Boykoff fingers our partisan politics here in the United States, as well as what we might call our “denial machine.” When stories were “balanced” in the United States, who tended to get quoted providing the “other side”? Well, a small number of contrarian scientists, many of them tied to conservative think tanks that were, in turn, partly funded by ExxonMobil. This has all been documented exhaustively by now, but for far too long, our media seemed oblivious to the relationship between fossil fuel interest and global warming skepticism.

By contrast, the U.K. media got pretty uppity about “Esso’s” role. Granted, it helped that the Royal Society, Britain’s top scientific organization, sent the oil giant an explicit letter in 2006 challenging its support of viewpoints outside the scientific mainstream. Where was the U.S. National Academy of Sciences or the American Association for the Advancement of Science on this front? We had a much more influential denial machine, but also a scientific establishment that failed to take it on. If the U.S. media got rolled on this story, it’s partly because U.S. scientists, as a group (despite stellar individual exceptions), didn’t help matters.

That’s critical, because the strategy of the contrarians was to sow doubt about mainstream climate science, thus triggering not only “balanced” coverage but, in general, an overwhelming impression of scientific uncertainty and controversy. It was only when the fog of doubt lifted—and when global warming could be reframed along different lines—that the issue garnered not only more attention but the right kind of attention. Boykoff highlights in particular a 2005 USA Today story from Dan Vergano: “The debate’s over: Globe is warming.” Yes it is, and yes, we finally caught on—and it may or may not be too late. Let’s hope that the next time we encounter a politicized scientific issue, a strategic attempt to sow doubt, and a confused media, scientists and their defenders move much more rapidly and decisively to counteract misinformation and set the record straight. If this story shows nothing else, it’s that we can’t simply trust our media to do it for us.

Chris Mooney is the Washington correspondent for Seed magazine and author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Tags: Climate Change, Framing Science, Media

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