https://grist.org/language/global-heating-climate-news-drought-chaos/
"Scientists are pretty sure that Earth is hotter than at any time in the last
125,000 years, but the news media is moving on, trying to keep on top of a fire
hose of pressing news — from the daily chaos of the Trump administration to the
breaking developments in the war on Iran. The shift in attention started during
the COVID-19 pandemic and, despite a temporary rebound, has gathered pace in
recent years: Since its peak in 2021, global news coverage of climate change
has dropped 38 percent, according to data from the University of Colorado
Boulder’s Media and Climate Change Observatory.
Many journalists have been busy digging through 3 million pages of the Epstein
files rather than the latest scientific report, though you can still find news
about some of the biggest recent findings, including that estimates of sea
level rise have been dramatically underestimated and that global warming has
accelerated “significantly” over the past decade.
Last year, the first of Trump’s second term, major broadcast networks in the
U.S. cut their climate coverage 35 percent compared to the year before,
according to a recent report by Media Matters, a watchdog organization. “The
competition, the ‘flood the zone’ strategy from the administration, is making
it very difficult for anything that’s not super urgent in this moment,” said
Allison Fisher, director of the climate and energy program at the nonprofit.
The change in focus has real-world consequences. When media coverage of a topic
dies down, it can be hard to drum up enthusiasm for protests and policy
changes. It’s out of sight, out of mind, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of
the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Normal people don’t spend
their time reading scientific papers or talking to a climate scientist over
their backyard fence. “Like, literally, billions of people know about climate
change only because the media has reported it,” Leiserowitz said.
When writers and editors prioritize — or deprioritize — a particular subject,
that sends a signal to both policymakers and the public. “They exercise one of
the very most powerful tools in politics, which is to define what topics are
talked about and what topics are not talked about, and within that, what range
of opinion is ventilated on those topics,” said Mark Hertsgaard, the co-founder
and executive director of Covering Climate Now, a nonprofit pushing for more
rigorous coverage of climate change. “So of course, when we stop talking about
climate change in the press, the public figures, ‘Oh, well, I guess it’s not
that important anymore,’ or ‘Maybe they figured it out’ or whatever.”
You can see the recent downswing in climate coverage in the U.S. by looking at
some of the country’s biggest legacy newspapers:
The New York Times,
The
Wall Street Journal,
The Washington Post, and the
Los Angeles Times. While
the
New York Times has published an enormous volume of articles about global
warming, its coverage has plunged, declining by 66 percent since its peak in
October 2021, when it published 646 articles mentioning the subject, and this
January, when it published 221."
Via Joyce Donahue.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
