We don't set policy, we tell stories

Writing in the July/August 2008 edition of the CJR, Christine Russell article has penned a poignant on climate change. A most worthy read. Some key points:

The era of “equal time” for skeptics who argue that global warming is just a result of natural variation and not human intervention seems to be largely over—except on talk radio, cable, and local television. Last year, a meteorologist at CBS’s Chicago station did a special report entitled “The Truth about Global Warming.” It featured local scientists discussing the hazards of global warming in one segment, well-known national skeptics in another, and ended with a cop-out: “What is the truth about global warming?…It depends on who you talk to.” Not helpful, and not good reporting.

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As the climate issue moves further into public policy, journalists will face new challenges in sorting out the political and economic interests of experts with a dizzying array of opinions about the costs and benefits of combating global warming. The he-said, she-said reporting just won’t do. The public needs a guide to the policy, not just the politics.

A Gallup report last November found that only about four in ten Americans believes that immediate, drastic action is needed to deal with global warming, and just one in four says there will be “extreme” effects of global warming in fifty years if efforts are not increased. Is this a failure of the experts and politicians to communicate the situation or a failure of journalists to dig and report?


... In the spring of 2006 ... Al Gore’s documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth ...jump-started media coverage of global warming after years on the back burner. Suddenly, climate change—that term is gaining ground over global warming, by the way—was on front pages and magazine covers, including Time’s iconic image of a lone polar bear and the warning, “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.”

Today, says Nisbet, “the underlying appeal is a moral message: ‘We’re all in this together.’ It’s a moral call to arms.” Gore’s new $300-million “We” media campaign seeks to cross the partisan divide with the optimistic motto: “We Can Solve It.” The cover of Time’s Spring 2008 environment issue, bordered in green instead of Time’s customary red, took the famous World War II photo of Marines raising a U.S. flag on Iwo Jima and substituted a tree to illustrate its bold headline: “How to Win the War on Global Warming.”

Others are feeling their way more carefully. “Sure, I care about the environment,” says Steve Curwood, host of “Living on Earth,” a weekly environmental show on more than three hundred public radio stations. “But it’s not our job to decide what should be done. It’s our job to inform the citizenry. Right now we have an alarmed citizenry, but still not a very well-informed one,” he said at a recent journalism forum.

“We don’t set policy, we tell stories,” says David Ledford, executive editor of The News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware, and president of The Associated Press Managing Editors. “But it’s important to not just throw out that the earth is on fire without giving a sense of what they can do.”

“It’s very simple. The job of a professional journalist is to give the audience information that is a good thing for them to know,” says seasoned ABC News correspondent Bill Blakemore, who has led the network’s new multiplatform approach to global warming. Yet he finds that the momentous nature of the climate-change story carries even more of a responsibility and psychological burden than the dozen wars he has covered. “The unprecedented nature of this story,” says Blakemore, “is quite grave.”