OMNI
CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE MEDIA, OMNI NEWSLETTER #1, April 18, 2013.
Compiled by Dick Bennett
for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology.
Mainstream (corporate) media during the past decades failed to
inform the public adequately about climate change, but these failures have been
examined and reported, and some notable improvements have occurred recently. (This newsletter is complemented by those on corporate
scams and denial, which partly explain the delay in public comprehension and
government delay. See Nakashian and
others below. )
Newsletters
Index:
Contents Climate Change and Media
Newsletter #1
IPCC:
“Climate Change 2013”
Denise
Robbins’ Comprehensive Study of Media Reporting of UN IPCC Reports
EXTRA!
Dick, Articles
from Extra! on Climate Change Give
the Bad News
Nakashian: Corporate Media Give False Balance to IPCC
Report
Hart: TV News Frequent Failure to Connect Weather
and Climate
Naureckas:
Time Magazine on Fracking Not Warming
Failure of Two
Main Parties
Silent
Sundays
Fox
News: Balance the True with the False Is
Fox Reporting
Dick: Moyers Interviews Leiserowitz, Yale Climate
Change Communication Project
Maxwell
and Miller’s Book, Greening the Media, Ways
to Reduce Toxic Communi
cation Technology
Dick, THE
WEATHER CHANNEL
IPCC,
CLIMATE CHANGE 2013: THE PHYSICAL SCIENCE
BASIS
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ANALYSIS: How The Media Covered the UN Climate Reports in Three Charts
|
|
 Denise Robbins,
Research, NationofChange, April 18, 2018: The final installment of the U.N.’s top climate report, which
calls for prompt, extensive action to avoid calamitous impacts from climate
change, garnered relatively little attention from the major print, cable and
broadcast media outlets compared to the first installment. However, coverage
of the third report rightfully gave far less space to those who cast doubt on
the science. |
Home > Extra! - The Magazine of FAIR,
the Media Watch Group
Extra! - The Magazine of FAIR, the Media Watch
Group
Extra! is FAIR's hard-hitting monthly magazine of
well-documented media criticism.
Extra! receives no money from advertisers or corporate
underwriters, and depends on subscribers for its existence. If you find the
information on this website valuable, please subscribe and help make it possible for us to
keep investigating and publishing.
Extra!'s staff:
Letters to the edit
THREE ARTICLES ON REPORTING WARMING IN EXTRA! (DEC. 2013).
MELANIE NAKASHIAN, “CERTAIN SCIENCE, DUBIOUS REPORTING.”
Reports on Part One of the 5th UN IPCC Report, Sept.
2013, the consensus of
thousands of scientists from 39 countries, or 97%, yet corporate media still
report denialists: Washington Post, L.A.
Times, Wall Street Journal ,
USA
PETER HART, “WEATHER—WITHOUT CLIMATE.”
“A new
FAIR study shows that even when covering weather events that scientists suggest
are linked to climate change, the news rarely mentions the changing
climate.” --Dick
JANINE JACKSON,
“CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT THE FUTURE,” EXTRA!
Traditional training of reporters to give “both
sides” madly deranges reports when only one side exists. Reporting the sun will rise does not justify
acknowledging the wacko denier. Because
anthropocentric, atmospheric, C02 warming receives the approval of 99% of
climatologists, and all national scientific academies, to report the 1%
disagreement, partly the puppetry of fossil fuel industry propaganda, is grossly
irresponsible. “Sadly, corporate
reporters’ fealty to notions of partisan balance means that many stories on
climate policy still include the predictable protests of deniers like Sen.
James ‘God’s still up there’ Inhofe (R.-Ok.).
Journalists should be “reporting countless compelling stories on the
actually happening effects of climate shifts”; for example, the seas rising to
drown the Pacific nation of Tuvalu .
(Jackson might have pointed out that the plight
of Tuvalu
was a fact by 2005, when Tim Flannery described it in The Weathermakers). –Dick
May
15
2012
Time
Ignores Climate Change to Paint a 'Golden Age' of Fracking
You have to wonder: Do journalists covering energy issues imagine they and
their loved ones are going to be living on another planet in the
not-too-distant future?
That seems like the only reason you would write a piece about
the world discovering ways to extract and burn vast new quantities of
hydrocarbons without mentioning one word about climate change. That's what
Bryan Walsh gave us in the May
21 issue of Time magazine–an article about fracking
that doesn't mention the technology's powerful contribution to global warming.
The headline over this article: "The Golden Age."
Walsh does refer to fracking's ecological impact, referring to
"environmental concerns over fracking–chiefly the possibility of groundwater
pollution." The groundwater contamination associated with fracking is
certainly bad, but most environmentalists will tell you that climate change is
the biggest challenge facing humanity–and that finding new ways to burn carbon
(and release methane as well) is utterly unhelpful.
Walsh concludes his article: "Fracking is here to stay,
scrambling a global energy picture that had long seemed settled."
Actually, the only thing that was settled was that people would have to totally
reinvent their energy systems if they wanted to avoid catastrophe. But for Time magazine, ignoring that catastrophe seems
to be the next best thing.
Extra!
(November 2012).
Failure of two main Parties and mainstream media to present Climate
Change.
SILENT SUNDAYS
Global
Warming Silence on Sunday TV
No
talk about climate's contribution to catastrophe From FAIR, publisher of EXTRA! Magazine. Nov. 5, 2012.
digg
You'd think a massive hurricane that
wreaked havoc along the East Coast might force the high-profile Sunday morning
TV shows to talk about climate change.
You'd be
wrong.
It's
time for us to tell the Sunday talkshows: Talk about climate change. Sign FAIR's petition today.
It is
difficult for most people to keep ignoring the link between catastrophic climate change
and weather catastrophes like "superstorm" Sandy
On NBC's Meet the Press, host David
Gregory said at the top of the show (11/4/12):
Should more attention be paid to a
changing climate's impact on the severity of these storms?
The answer
to that question would appear to be no--since the episode never talked about
climate change again.
On ABC's This Week (11/4/12),
right-leaning pundit Matthew Dowd made a passing comment about climate change
and how it would affect Mitt Romney's electioneering. On CBS's Face the Nation, host Bob
Schieffer likewise framed the storm in terms of its impact on the election (11/4/12):
And then there's the wild card: What
impact will the superstorm that destroyed parts of New
Jersey and plunged the lower half of Manhattan
On Fox News Sunday (11/4/12),
climate change was not an issue either; the hurricane was discussed as a
political opportunity for President Barack Obama.
There's no
doubt that climate change is rarely a front-burner issue for corporate media.
But the weekend after a massive, once-in-a-century storm ravages the East
Coast, climate change is hardly a footnote on the networks' Sunday shows?
If this was
not the time to talk about climate change, when will that day come?
ACTION:
Tell the
Sunday shows: It's time to have a real discussion of climate change--with
experts on climate, not political pundits. Sign FAIR's petition tod
"Fox News
e-mail shows network's slant on climate change 12-19-10
"Fox News
Channel's top Washington
Media Matters for America
said the internal e-mail from Bill Sammon, Fox News's Washington bureau chief, called into
question the network's impartiality in reporting on climate change.
In an e-mail sent last December to Fox News's journalists in
the wake of a global conference on climate change, Sammon asked Fox journalists
to "refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any
given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon
data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists
to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies."
Rest of Washington Post story here https://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&shva=1#inbox/12cfc361892efdfb
FILM
ON CC
Bill Moyers and Company, AETN, PBS, Sunday, January 6,
2012.
Moyers interviewed Anthony
Leiserowitz, Yale Projects on Climate Change Communication
Full of dramatic facts.
11 record disasters in 2011 each costing over $1
billion.
Price-Waterhouse Accounting firm declared: if world
double its expenditures? the planet’s temp would rise 6 degrees.
6 levels of human awareness.
Why public passive?
Powerful corporate disinformation campaign.
Science on CC and action based on facts will reduce
jobs? No, and public knows it, but
corp. disinfo. undermines mobilization.
Framing the CC debate:
What route leads to freedom for US citizens?
What future do you envision for your grandchildren?
CC a way back to liberal middle, who believe in
affirmative, constructive government for the People and want gov’t. to confront CC. --Dick
Greening the Media
Richard MaxwellToby
Miller, Oxford
You will never look at your cell phone, TV, or computer the same
way after reading this book. Greening the Media
not only reveals the dirty secrets that hide inside our favorite electronic
devices; it also takes apart the myths that have pushed these gadgets to the
center of our lives. Marshaling an astounding array of economic, environmental,
and historical facts, Maxwell and Miller debunk the idea that information and
communication technologies (ICT) are clean and ecologically benign. The authors show how the physical reality
of making, consuming, and discarding them is rife with toxic ingredients,
poisonous working conditions, and hazardous waste. But all is not lost. As
the title suggests, Maxwell and Miller dwell critically on these environmental
problems in order to think creatively
about ways to solve them. They enlist a range of potential allies in this
effort to foster greener media--from green consumers to green citizens, with
stops along the way to hear from exploited workers, celebrities, and assorted
bureaucrats. Ultimately, Greening the Media
rethinks the status of print and screen technologies, opening new lines of
historical and social analysis of ICT, consumer electronics, and media
production.
"Someone
once said that people should never go into the kitchen of a restaurant where
they enjoy eating. Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell take us into the electronic
media's kitchen, and the food will never taste the same again. In a brilliant,
even stunning, expose of the environmental practices and impact of media
corporations, Greening the Media is one of the most important media books in
years. Extremely readable and entertaining, this highly original and
well-researched book should be mandatory reading for everyone with a cell phone
or a flat-screen television." --Robert W. McChesney, coauthor of The Death and Life of American Journalism
Richard Maxwell is Professor and Chair of Media Studies
at Queens College
Toby Miller is Distinguished Professor of Media & Cultural Studies at theUniversity
of California , Riverside
Toby Miller is Distinguished Professor of Media & Cultural Studies at the
COMMENTS ON THE WEATHER CHANNEL BY DICK
BENNETT
THE WEATHER CHANNEL and Pretend Meteorology
By Dick Bennett
During March 20-13, 2013 TWC heavily
advertised their forthcoming programs on mass extinctions, forecasting the end times. Our planet has experienced 5 mass
extinctions, and we are at the beginning of the 6th. What the ad does not reveal is that the
first five had natural causes while the present mass extinction is caused by
humans. The ad is the Mother of All
Distractions from the present anthropogenic warming/extreme weather.
Another equally
intensely advertized program was an adventure series on prospecting. Yes
prospecting. Yes, while the greatest
catastrophe ever faced by humans rushes upon us, TWC focused on prospecting and
the End Times, the comparatively trivial and the immensely serious but
irrelevant past.
What should be
the supremely urgent challenge of climate change to a program staffed by
meteorologists—meteorology the science dealing with the atmosphere, weather and
climate—is dismissed by the comparatively insignificant and by association with
the fanatically religious. Several
years ago one Sunday I visited the “Crosses
Church
Because the
planet, humanity, and all species are threatened with more and more human-caused,
intense weather extremes,--floods, droughts, fires, rising seas, mass
extinctions, and refugees of all species--, our professionals and officials should
be telling the truth and helping people
be informed and globally, massively adapting, but just one year ago TWC played to
fundamentalist inevitability and the bottom line.
ABRACADABRA September 28, 2013, that
broken, faux The Weather Channel, for years composed of ignorant or cowardly ostensible
meteorologists, has been transformed into a well-informed, truth-telling,
authentic, reliable scientific source of information about Climate Change! Today at 5:13 a.m. CST, TWC presented facts
about anthropogenic warming (fossil fuels and cutting forests), seas rising,
the urgent need to reverse CO2, and the equally urgent need to concentrate on
adaptations to protect the world’s populations.
What happened
between March and September to inspire (compel!) this change, I do not yet
know. Do you?.
UPDATE NOVEMBER 15, 2013: OH OH, IT’S STILL PLAYTIME ON TWC
Yes, a new series of “The Prospectors” is showing, and with
a young woman prospector dressed IN a Western movie outfit right out of the
familiar barroom.
But at least the “meteorologists” are mentioning climate
change. How?
This morning a tear-jerker about the stressed-out Polar Bears,
their numbers decreasing, their struggle for food intensifying. Al and Stephanie, the poor Polar Bears, isn’t
it a shame.
CANT is a word that by now is surely familiar to everyone
watching TWC. From the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary (1991): “cant –n. 1. insincere or hypocritical
statements, esp. pious platitudes.” If
they are what they claim to be (and all the rest on TWC) they have known, or
should have known, the climate was warming and the weather was becoming more
extreme, and the animals were threatened.
In 1988 James Hansen wrote about and testified before Congress the facts
of warming, and one of the UN’s greatest initiatives, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was established in the same year. No scientist certainly and no responsible
official should have been ignorant since the 1990s. (But of course, in some extenuation, the
fossil fuel industry was spending millions of dollars to prevent that awareness
among the People. But TWC is supposed to
be meteorologists!)
From Wikipedia:
“2007 global warming controversy
The web site Capital
Weather published an
interview with WJLA meteorologist Brian van de Graaff.[15] In this interview, van de Graaff stated:
The subject of global warming definitely makes headlines in the
media and is a topic of much debate. I try to read up on the subject to have a
better understanding, but it is complex. Often, it is so politicized and those
on both sides don't always appear to have their facts straight. History has
taught us that weather patterns are cyclical and although we have noticed a
warming pattern in recent time, I don't know what generalizations can be made
from this with the lack of long-term scientific data. That's all I will say
about this.”
Van de Graaff was so
ignorant I wonder what the result of that statement was. Did TWC give him a raise in 2007? Possibly.
I doubt they fired him, for that was typical. Where is he now? –Dick
Return to 2014: I have blamed the false meteorologists. But aren’t we all culpable? How many of us well-informed people pushed
TWC employees to tell the truth. I didn’t. Why did we allow them to get away with
ignorance and lying? Why do informed people defer to them who are
supposed to be the informed? We did the
same thing with local responsible officials—our so-called “emergency managers”
and Quorum Court Sky Island
END
CLIMATE CHANGE AND MEDIA NEWSLETTER #1
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