As Dylan told us, we don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows, and we don’t need a chart to tell us that mass media’s attention to climate change is on the wane. It has headed down, a trend underway for several years. Nonetheless, the figures one sees at The Daily Climate, a Montana-based organization and on line outlet that aggregates and analyzes news of climate change and related topics, are striking.

TDC’s editor Douglas Fischer reports that in 2011  media coverage of climate change, as reflected in newspapers, broadcast, and other mostly-conventional outlets, fell 20 percent below what it was in 2010, and 42 percent from what it says was its peak year, in 2009. He oversees, according to TDC’s “about” page, eight senior web researchers and an additional 18 plain old web researchers who monitor US and world media. That’s a lot of person-hours, one presumes. No wonder a look at its front page -  first link in this post – shows it beats this here ksjtracker site all hollow in keeping up with the flow of news related to our warming, acidifying world.

Fischer, a member of the Soc’y of Environmental Journalists, former newsman in the SF Bay Area and Alaska, and holder of a philosophy degree from Columbia, provides a striking list of the most prolific climate reporters in 2011. Its leader is Fiona Harvey of the Guardian in the UK, followed by NYT blogger and former reporter (officially in NYTimes-speak, but he’s still a reporter) Andrew C. Revkin, then Matt Wald at NYTimes, Richard Black at BBC, and on down through 55 names – most of the leaders familiar to keenly attentive tracker readers. Of the top 25 as seen in the list snipped from the report, four are at the Guardian, four at Reuters, and three at the NYTimes. The top individual producer, Harvey, had 132 bylines last year, while the last six still each did 30 – which is two or three per month and one bets those reporters had other topics to cover too. The full list, in the body of the story, includes hyperlinks on each reporter’s name leading to a full accounting of his or her output. Wow. That is some documentation.

In all, its count of 7,140 journalists who filed 19,000 climate stories in the year just ended compares with more than 11,000 reporters and  about 32,400 stories in 2009. The piece includes reference to other studies with similar general tone.

Well, that’s pretty dismal. Fischer does not mention a confounding variable – one that cannot possibly undo the overall message but that might temper it a bit. Which is that, in the US at least and more recently I’ve heard in the UK and other nations, old time mass media outlets have slashed newsroom staffs and coverage of all topics, maybe even including Hollywood scandals and popular health blather. By how much the withering of climate change has outpaced overall mass media decline is not clear here. That is, are mass media less interested – or just less able?

Another factor to consider is that 2009 was the year that so-called climategate hit the news (in November), and just prior to the flop of a world climate conference in Copenhagen with its headlines. Those were big news events. Since then, what fundamentally new has occurred in the climate conversation? Mainstream reporters and editors are no longer impressed by confirmation of continued warming, by continued ice loss,by  continued consensus belief and worry by the mainstream academy of experts that humanity is horribly fouling its nest, by continued political paralysis, and  by continued vociferous rejectionism from a small core of climate scientists and a lot of mostly-conservative forces worried the whole thing is a devious exercise in fiction and wishful thinking by leftist forces.

Further, counting heads and bylines could conceal the tendency of many outlets, their own staffs now too lean to provide as much inhouse coverage as has been their custom, to pick up stories from the wires or other news outlets.  One may not read of a new climate report in the Miami Herald or Boston Globe from its own reporter, but one from the AP, Reuters, Wired, or LiveScience etc. could be there for its readers. One could go on with caveats, particularly the growing public reliance on the web for news surely compensates somewhat for the inability of big old-timey news media to dominate what the public gets.

But as a portrait of a general story that is going a little stale despite its immense importance, and of a media industry in agony, this is an arresting report.

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 4th, 2012 at 11:16 am and is filed under About Journalism, Environment & Energy Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.