Panel of journalists advocate environmental reporting

Montana Kaimin: Three journalism panelists discussed the challenges facing the media in its coverage of climate change during last evening’s lecture “Climate Change & the Press: Improving of the Public Dialogue.” “There has been a 25-year history of climate denial,” said panelist Frank Allen, president of the Missoula-based Institutes for Journalism & Natural Resources and former environment editor for The Wall Street Journal. The panelists agreed times have changed and climate change has moved to the forefront of the global discussion.

“I see the role of media as making sense of science,” said panelist Michelle Nijhuis, an environment and science journalist who writes for the Smithsonian, The Christian Science Monitor and High Country News. In addition to improving communication between journalists and scientists, panelist Steve Schwarze, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Montana, said improving the discussion of climate change needs to start with a focus on the local.

Finding relevance by localizing climate change is key, Schwarze said, and will therefore create a meaningful link to the topic. “It is about finding local relevant stories to what is really a national story,” Allen said. This means that climate change coverage needs to translate across the front pages of newspapers and not just get covered in the science or political section, Schwarze said. “It has to be scattered throughout the newspaper,” Schwarze said. But a large effect on the global warming discussion has been the changing face of journalism itself, the panelists agreed.

“There’s also this level of the economy of the media that affects the scope and coverage of climate change,” Schwarze said. The media operates as businesses, the panelists pointed out, and therefore the challenges in the newsroom affect the discussion on global warming. With advertisements designed to draw in readers’ eyes, editors don’t want “more doom and gloom stories,” Nijhuis said. “Selling a climate change story to an editor is a hard thing to do,” Nijhuis said. “Stories like climate change, or the environment, don’t break, they ooze over a long period of time,” Allen said. “That’s a problem.”

With vast staff cuts and downsizing in the media world, especially newspapers, Allen said these pressures trickle down and affect the quality of environmental or global warming stories. But skepticism still lingers, the panelists agreed, and a big question during the discussion was the topic of objectivity on global warming: How much of a voice is given to the skeptics? “Is a balanced story really a fair and accurate one?” Schwarze asked.

Journalists are pressured to also split stories equally between different perspectives, he said, but with global warming becoming more and more certain in the minds of scientists and the media alike, he questioned how far journalists should go to find both sides. “Journalists hesitate to take a role that looks like advocacy,” Allen said. With the panelists making references to the tobacco industry in the 1950s that spread doubt about health claims that tobacco was harmful, the panelists discussed whether this same seed of doubt had been planted in the global warming debate.

Companies like Exxon Mobile and Peabody Coal started putting out confusing information on global warming under names like the “Global Climate Coalition.” They claimed, “What if the climate models are wrong” and “Let’s not rush into this.” “This had a remarkable effect on journalists,” Allen said, adding that a lot of weight has been given to these non-scientific based reviews. “It’s the responsibility of journalism to expose these ties,” Allen said…

TV journalist at a bridge collapse, "Mordac," Wikimedia Commons