Why aren't Sunday morning news shows asking about Global Warming?

(An intro for you international readers and those who avoid TV) All the major networks have a half-hour to one-hour show on Sunday morning where various pundits and news figures interview various White House and Congressional figures. I stopped watching these a while ago since they have an annoying conservative bias and only talk about what the Village Elders (pundits in the prestige press) think is important.

But because it is a reflection of what the Village Elders think is important, its telling that these talk shows, which frequently have presidential candidates or their spokesmen as guests, don't ask about global warming. We don't want them asking if its real. We want them to ask candidates what they're going to do about it.

The League of Conservation Voters have set up a website highlighting this issue and started a petition to hopefully get their attention. I encourage you to sign it.

Chicago Sun-Times business editor shills for denialists

A minor journalism scandal is brewing here in Chicago over the decision by Chicago Sun-Times editor Dan Miller to write a cover letter urging an "open mind" over global warming. The cover letter is part of a package sent out by right-wing "think" tank The Heartland Institute. (Hat tip to Inel for alerting me to this.)

Phil Rosenthal over at the Chicago Tribune saw some of his fellow reporters get the package and wrote about it first:

Chicago Sun-Times Business Editor Dan Miller apparently believes this paper doesn't have enough editors to guide its staff. Two Chicago Tribune reporters received a letter under his name urging them to "keep an open mind" on global warming.

Heartland Institute spokesman Tom Swiss was maybe a little too honest in explaining The Plan: "If it came from just ourselves, it would look like an advertisement and just get lost." And its not just reporters who are getting this package:

The letters went to others in the media, Swiss said. Others whom Swiss declined to name signed cover letters that accompanied packages for those in other fields.

What is it about denialists and their packages? If you get one of these, let me know.

Who is Miller and why would he do this? Rosenthal tells us all we need to know:

Miller, who oversaw Heartland publications in 1998 and 1999 before joining the Sun-Times, is friends with Heartland President and Chief Executive Joseph Bast.

Is he in trouble? Maybe:

Efforts to reach Miller by phone and e-mail for comment Thursday and Friday were unsuccessful. Sun-Times Editor in Chief Michael Cooke indicated Thursday that he did not know about the Heartland packages and wanted to talk to Miller, a 2006 Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame inductee.

Rosenthal quotes Poynter Institute for media studies ethics scholar Bob Steele:

Most news organizations discourage staffers from being activists, particularly on issues that touch on what they cover or edit, Steele said. "It would be exceptionally hard to argue that global warming doesn't fall somewhere in the sphere of business," he said. "At least based on the cards I see on the table, it raises serious ethical concerns."

Jon Coifman over at the National Resource Defense Council doesn't think Rosenthal went far enough:

Still not convinced that this is a deep breach of journalistic ethics?

Try replaying the same scenario, but substitute “Hillary Clinton” or “Rudy Giuliani” for “global warming.” If the business editor for a leading metropolitan daily had sent a letter nakedly encouraging fellow reporters to take a second look at one of the presidential candidates, he would fast be looking for a new job.

Here, he has done essentially the same thing by throwing himself into one of the most important political debates today.

(For comparison's sake, note that *former* ABC News correspondent Carole Simpson yesterday had to offer up her resignation from the journalism program at Emerson College for publicly endorsing Hilary Clinton for President.)

To be clear: It would have been perfectly legitimate for Miller to raise this sort of question in a column, under the cold hard light of day. Or to assign a reporter to a news story examining the issue.

But it is *not* OK for him to be using his name and that of the paper as part of a one-sided, behind-the-scenes sales pitch from an organization with an expressly unbalanced view of a critical public issue. (It wouldn’t be any more appropriate for him to stick his name on something from us, for the same reason.)

Heartland President Joseph Bast apparently didn't like Rosenthal's piece calling it "libelous" in an email sent to his list which was reprinted in the blog of one of the package's recipients, Houston Chronicle reporter Eric Berger. In a typical bullying tactic of denialists, he included the emails of Rosenthal and his interviewee Steele in the letter and encouraged his minions to "let them know what you think". I hope Rosenthal publishes some of those thoughtful, intelligent letters!

Update: St. Petersburg Times got the package and are unimpressed.

Update 2: Former reporter Richard Littlemore weighs in over at desmogblog. Read all the way to the end for his spot-on put down of Miller and lawyer-baiting of Heartland.

More on the WPost Democrats and climate change story

I was going to make this an update to my previous post on this Washington Post article and its false choices but there's another angle to this.

First, Talking Points Memo noticed how awful this article was:

A few days ago, The Washington Post ran a long front-page story that carried this frightful headline:

Climate Is a Risky Issue for Democrats

There was zero polling data in the piece to support this claim. As Matthew Yglesias noted, the basis for it appeared to be little more than the "time honored principled Everything is Bad News for Democrats."

TPM links to a Politico story on a poll, conducted by a Republican pollster, which suggests the opposite, its bad for Republicans to ignore the issue and not propose solutions. Republicans need to do something. TPM concludes:

Yet despite the fact that lots of Republicans have reached this conclusion, somehow The Washington Post was only able to discover that this is a risky issue for Democrats. This illustrates once again that the default setting for many in the political media is still that Dems are always vulnerable; Dems are always at risk of getting too far ahead of public opinion; and Dems are always at risk of provoking a backlash from the same public that strongly agrees with them.

It'll be interesting to see if WaPo revisits this issue, now that we have some actual empirical evidence to shed light on the topic the paper reported so extensively on. Somehow one doubts that WaPo will call up Ayres and ask him what gives.

I'm not holding my breath.

The Columbia Journalism Review treated this article more seriously then it deserves. But I thought this passage said a lot:

Indeed, energy and the environment have been a source of strength for the Democrats in particular....The concern that the public may react unfavorably to a strong pro-environment platform in the general election is a fairly novel idea for news pages, and Post writer Juliet Eilperin makes the case that it’s legitimate.

"Makes the case". Think about that for a minute. Its not reporting that Eilperin is doing. She's trying to persuade her readers to believe something that simply isn't true. Making a case.

This is almost "swift boating". Here's the WPost taking a Democratic strength, the environment, and saying, with no support at all, just conjecture, that its a weakness for the candidates. I predict the next step in this will be a story which talks about how "reasonable" and "sensible" the Republican candidates plans are. Lets hope this particular brand of "kick the Democrats" that the beltway media loves to play stops here.

False choices: economy or environment?

The Washington Post had a front page article on the presidential candidates' plans on global warming with the awful title: Climate Is a Risky Issue for Democrats and and even worse sub-title: Candidates Back Costly Proposals You almost don't have to read the article. The title asks the question "why is it risky?" and the subtitle has the answer: because its costly!

I've complained about Post headline writers before. If you read the article, you'll find what's becoming a....oh no I'm going to use that word..."frame" for solutions-focused articles: you get to choose between business-as-usual early 21st century prosperity or fix the environment and guess which one those no-fun liberals want you to choose?

Lets just pick apart the opening paragraph:

All of the leading Democratic contenders for the presidency are committed to a set of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that would change the way Americans light their homes, fuel their automobiles and do their jobs, costing billions of dollars in the short term but potentially, the candidates say, saving even more in the decades to follow.

"would change" is followed with "costly" implying its not a change for the better. Also its stated as fact that it will definitely cost billions while it only "potentially" will save more. And the savings is "candidates say" implying its one of those lies they like to tell while the cost is just a God-given fact.

Quotes from Clinton's energy speech are for some reason countered with an MIT study about how much energy will cost in 2050 under an 80% reduction plan. Where's the quote about how unreliable economic forecast models are? Oh wait, they only do that for climate models.

A Siegel has more on how you can both protect the environment and be prosperous. A frequent subject on Michael Tobis's blog is how silly it is to discuss "cost-benefit" when we're talking about the one-and-only planet we live on.

I actually liked the second half of the article which goes into how global warming is figuring in to political strategy for the upcoming presidential election. This actually cheered me up:

"It's a huge issue. I've been stunned by this," said Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, who found in a May poll that energy independence and global warming were cited as America's most important domestic challenge by 29 percent of respondents, second only to health care. "I think this is a top-tier voting issue that has crossover appeal," Greenberg said.

Republicans will try to attack them on the cost. I hope some candidate points out that it's a false choice.

Update: another take on this article above.

Al Gore to lauch $100 million climate change ad campaign

Kudos to Steve Hargreaves over at CNN Money who seems to be the only traditional media reporter (and just barely that since he writes for CNN's web site) to catch this:

The former vice president, Oscar-winner and now Nobel Peace Prize recipient is embarking on a climate-change advertising campaign estimated to cost between $100 million and $200 million a year, one of the largest public service campaigns in history [emphasis added]. Expect to see television commercials, newspaper spreads and Internet ads popping up in a few months time.

Funded by donations and proceeds from Gore's 2006 "An Inconvenient Truth," the campaign will focus on convincing people that they can do something about global warming.

"It's about communicating the urgency and solvability of the climate crises," said Brian Hardwick, a spokesman for the Alliance for Climate Change, an environmental group founded and chaired by Gore. "So [people] will demand the kind of change we need."

The campaign is organized through the Alliance for Climate Protection, which is also the organization Al Gore donated his Nobel Peace Prize money too.

Looks like I won't have to worry about global warming falling off the radar between now and the next IPCC report (if there is one.)

IPCC Working Group II full report released to silence.

The IPCC process can be confusing. In a nutshell, there are three working groups looking at science of, impacts from and response to climate change, respectively. Each group releases a "Summary for Policymakers" and then a full report.

Working Group II, which looks at impacts, released its summary back in April and the full report earlier this week (Sept 18). While the summary was noticed, did anyone notice the full report? Not that I can tell.

Adam Siegel pointed out the lack of coverage and also noticed this depressing quote from an article in the U.K.'s The Independent:

"If warming is not kept below two degrees centigrade, which will require the strongest mitigation efforts, and currently looks very unlikely to be achieved, the substantial global impacts will occur, such as species extinctions, and millions of people at risk from drought, hunger, flooding."

If preventing a two degree warming is now "very unlikely" and the IPCC says so, that's news. But I can't find that phrase in the report itself. The source of the quote is referred to as "the body" by The Independent. A google search turned up an article on the same subject and with the same quote in Marie Claire U.K. (!?) But here the quote is "A spokesman said". Maybe a reporter can fill me in on the distinction.

The source of this quote must have been from the press conference. In a way, its good that this wasn't in the full report because its supposed to not contain any surprises: all the main conclusions are supposed to be in the Summary for Policymakers. That may also be why the full report isn't getting much coverage. Still, that's a newsworthy quote whatever the source.

(I'm back home for a week. But now each evening I have a choice: unpack or blog?)

Editor and Publisher columnist: "Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity"

I've argued on this blog that the denialists haven't been getting nearly as much of their material in to the traditional media since the IPCC report came out in February (when I started this blog). They're mostly heard in the right wing outlets and in editorial and columnist pages (and in the non-traditional media.)

But other's are still concerned. The excellent column by Mark Lynas (below) started out haranguing the false balance in global warming stories. Now Steve Outing, a columnist for the newspaper trade magazine Editor and Publisher, has published a strong argument for abandoning "objectivity" about climate change.

He starts out thinking about what he can do do make his kid's world better:

I've also been thinking about the newspaper industry and global warming. And frankly, I don't think newspapers are doing enough. Indeed, newspapers' fabled commitment to "objectivity" has been a detriment to efforts to combat global warming.

The industry still has a lot of power to influence people. How about if newspapers abandon their old way of doing things when it comes to the issue of global warming, and turn their influence to good? It just might be that through this issue alone, newspapers revive themselves to some extent. Editors are shirking their responsibility to improve our world, in my view, so let's change that.

This echo's Mark Lynas' call for a "more rigorous and honest approach".

He then goes on the say where objectivity is meant to be used:

I have no quibble with the status quo when it comes to controversial issues where there is a significant split of opinion. Outside of the opinion section, most newspapers are not going to allow writers and editors to express an opinion on hot debates like the right to abortion, or public funding for stem cell research. There are sizable groups of people lining up on both sides of those issues (not to mention those who fall in between). It would be journalistic suicide to take a mainstream paper and go on an advocacy tear about abortion, for example.

But advocacy in terms of encouraging people to act to alleviate climate change is really a wholly different issue. There's clearly scientific consensus that humans are altering the planet's climate, and that the effect is accelerating. Stronger hurricanes, melting glaciers and sea ice, worse wildfires and longer fire seasons, more severe droughts and flooding, and more frequent bizarre weather events overall.

Wow. I'm glad that message has gotten through to this non-scientist professional newspaperman.

For me the most interesting part was this mini-history of "objectivity":

The problem with that kind of coverage is that it doesn't permit journalists to find the truth in an issue, like global warming. Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University and a respected new media observer, points out that journalistic objectivity first arose in the 1920s and '30s -- following a period of sensational, "muckraking" reporting by newspapers.

"Part of the problem is that journalists don't realize what objectivity was in the first place," says Rosen. "From the beginning it was a way of limiting liability, and allowing journalists to take a pass when it's hard to figure out who's right and what's really going on. From the beginning it was meant to dull the knife edge of the press. It was meant to 'de-voice' or defang the individual journalist, so that more people would be comfortable with the product. But the costs of that system have built up over time.

"One of the most insidious and deceptive things about the system of objectivity is how it persuades journalists that the alternative to it is 'subjectivity.' From this angle, to relinquish objectivity means to surrender to partisanship, opinion, bias. Not very attractive, that. But what if the real alternative is truthtelling itself?" Rosen adds.

That's a powerful observation that should be repeated often to anyone trying browbeat the media into downplaying or denying global warming. The alternative to false-balance "objectivity" in global warming reporting is not advocacy or subjectivity but truthtelling.

He concludes the philosophical discussion:

The good professor would seem to support my idea that newspapers' sacred commitment to journalistic objectivity perhaps is hindering the power of the press to impact humans' behavior, because in the name of objectivity, reporters must give equal time to the tiny minority of skeptics and not go too far out on a limb to declare that climate change indeed is caused by humankind. (Perhaps that's why during recent news coverage of severe summer flooding in the Midwest US and historic wildfires in Greece, seldom is mentioned the possible -- I'd suggest, likely -- link between those events and human-caused climate change.)

As long as news organizations keep alive the idea that there's still a "debate" about whether human-induced climate change is real or not, people have an excuse for not changing their behavior.

What I take away from this is that editors need to go beyond making sure their reporters don't fall for the denialist spin, they need to also clean up their editorial pages.

Mr. Outing's inbox was apparently filled with flames from a few newspaper people and some denier usual suspects. Lets let him know his views are appreciated.

The morality of global warming and its reporting

I've been aware of the movement to describe global warming as a moral issue but mostly saw it as a way to bring more people, such as religious leaders, in to the effort to stop it.

However this excellent column by British reporter and activist Mark Lynas, called "Neutrality is cowardice", has made a connection between this moral side and reporting which I had not appreciated.

The BBC was planning an "Earth Relief" day of climate-change related programming. A little complaining from some anti-environmentalists and the BBC executives couldn't disown it fast enough:

The spat at last weekend's Edinburgh International Television Festival was a classic example of this impulse to timidity. When the anti-environmentalist film-maker Martin Durkin and his Channel 4 commissioning editor Hamish Mykura attacked the BBC's upcoming Planet Relief project - a proposed day of climate change-related programming and entertainment modelled on Comic Relief - corporation executives present rushed to disown it. "It is absolutely not the BBC's job to save the planet," insisted Newsnight editor Peter Barron. "I think there are a lot of people who think that it must be stopped."

Yes its not the BBC's job but if you could help save the planet, wouldn't you? Here's the passage that really struck me:

If Barron is really suggesting that the BBC should be "neutral" on the question of planetary survival, his absurd stance surely sets a new low for political cowardice in the media. It is also completely inconsistent. On easy moral questions, such as poverty in Africa, the BBC is quite happy to campaign explicitly (as with Comic Relief or Live Aid), despite the claim by the corporation's head of television news, Peter Horrocks, that its role is "giving people information, not leading them or prophesying". By analogy, the BBC would have been neutral on the question of slavery in the mid-19th century, and should be giving full voice today to the likes of the British National Party - all in the interests of balance and fairness. Likewise, it should not cover the plight of Aids orphans in South Africa without constantly acknowledging the views of the tiny minority who still dispute the link between HIV and Aids.

Another example that immediately came to mind was Apartheid in South Africa which the press here easily condemned in the eighties. More from Mr. Lynas:

It is worth re-stating again what a more rigorous and honest approach to climate change might look like. First, it would recognise that, despite small uncertainties regarding the specifics, the larger scientific question regarding causality has been settled for a decade at least. Second, it would acknowledge the moral repercussions of our failure to act so far: on people who are already suffering and dying in more frequent and extreme weather events, on future generations of human beings who will suffer a far worse fate, and on other species that will be driven to extinction as a result.

Mr Lynas has a lower opinion of reporters, editors and producers then I do (some of them know what to do). But this does put the onus on the traditional media: its not enough to not give deniers space in your pages or patiently explain the latest scientific findings. They need to talk about how this is ruining lives now and in the future and why action is necessary now. More on this in a future post.

I'll also track down and comment on an interesting reference Mr. Lynas found comparing denier-speak with pro-slavery arguments from 19th century America!

Update: BBC canceled the Planet Relief special. Cowards.

Newsweek's history of "The Denial Machine"

The August 13th edition of Newsweek has an eye-catching cover with a picture of the sun and the headline "Global Warming is a Hoax*". The asterisk goes on to say "Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change. Inside the denial machine". This excellent article by Sharon Begley (with help from 4 others) gives a history of the denial efforts which started as a response to Jim Hanson's 1988 testimony to Congress and continue through today.

If you are new to this topic and think there's any doubt about global warming, please read this article and see how you've been manipulated. Even if this is all old news, its a good summary.

The article is mostly history but here's a quote about where things stand today:

To some extent, greenhouse denial is now running on automatic pilot. "Some members of Congress have completely internalized this," says Pew [Center for Climate Change]'s [Manik] Roy, and therefore need no coaching from the think tanks and contrarian scientists who for 20 years kept them stoked with arguments

.
Fortunately, they can still be voted out of office.

Update: Joe over at Climate Progress thinks Newsweek wasn't hard enough. He also think the cover is a little to clever and I agree with that. A lot of people will just read the cover headline and not see the asterisk.

Update II: more on this article from me here and here.