"The media's role has helped opponents of climate action stifle progress"

Climate Progress discusses an interesting article by Eric Pooley, who has been managing editor of Fortune, national editor of Time, Time’s chief political correspondent, and Time’s White House correspondent, where he won the Gerald Ford Prize for Excellence in Reporting. Pooley recently analyzed the past 15 months of media coverage of climate change. Among his conclusions:

"for most reporters covering [the Lieberman-Warner climate bill] story, the default role was that of stenographer–presenting a nominally balanced view of the debate without questioning the validity of the arguments, sometimes even ignoring evidence that one side was twisting truth... The media’s collective decision to play the stenographer role actually helped opponents of climate action stifle progress."

"Mainstream news organizations have accepted the conclusions of the IPCC but have not yet applied those conclusions to the economic debate. The terms of that debate have been defined by opponents of climate action who argue that reducing emissions would “cost too much.” So the battle has been fought over the short-term price of climate action and its impact on GDP, while overlooking an extremely important variable, the long-term costs of inaction and business as usual."

In short, he concludes that the media's willingness to report information without verifying its accuracy has helped opponents of climate action stifle progress.  It's an interesting article.

Yeah American media has gone way down here.  Now it's basically "infotainment".  People don't want to just get the news, they want to be entertained at the same time.  So like you say, they do sensationalistic stories.  But at the same time, they're scared to death of being labeled as 'biased', so even though global warming presents a great opportunity for sensationalist stories, they tend to go the other way.  Although portraying the perspective that "greenies are blowing it out of proportion to get your money" is sensationalistic in its own right.

Climate Progress just had a very relevant entry to this subject.

The recent Australian fires were exacerbated by the dry conditions caused by the extensive droughts in the country, which global warming contributed to.

The French media headline on the subject was “Australian wildfire ferocity linked to climate change: experts.”

The Reuters Climate Change Correspondent in Asia headline went: “Australia fires a climate wake-up call: experts.”

In the US, the AP, CNN, ABC, and Washington Post not only didn't mention climate change in their headlines, they didn't mention it in their stories at all.  Although the NY Times did a better job.  Still, it's amazing how resistant our media is to linking anything to climate change.  I'm sure they're afraid of being labeled as "alarmist" or "biased".