Media culture and environmental journalism

Environmental reporting has always struggled to garner column inches: It is not purely event-based, but ongoing, making it hard to penetrate the media agenda. An oil spill or earthquake will be splashed over the front page for up to a week, depending on the severity, locale or casualties, before disappearing into the ether where important, ongoing, but not necessarily exiting stories reside. Any news agency worth their salt would be all over a bull in a china shop, but no-one would report on sticking the plates back together.

Climate change has the same problem, of course: It’s hard to document in actual time, as a narrative of significant events, despite continuing every minute of every day. The consequences are dire, yet climate change does not fit into the media model of what is happening right now.

Environmental journalism in Britain has attempted to evolve from antithetical scaremongering into something more scientific and consistent. Furor over nuclear power, GM crops, or the MMR vaccine is a thing of the past: The MMR example would never happen today, as journalists strive to create a balanced picture of the science behind a potential story, rather than finding and publicising the most controversial report, sometimes based around an insignificant sample of evidence.

The desired change can be summarised by the prioritisation of evidence over sensationalism, environmental journalism mirroring science by using research to create hypothesis, rather than plucking select information to prove what could become a powerful story. Points to the journalists, then, but not so to the publications…

You are the editor: A rival publication runs a story that attracts hightened public attention, increases their circulation, and sparks debate. You speak to your environmental correspondent, who says ‘I’ve come across this story before, it doesn’t add up, it’s based on one report from some crackpot source’. Do you abandon the story and miss out on the chance to compete in the marketplace and become part of the genesis of public discourse? Or do you tell your reporter to go with it, regardless of concerns surrounding the integrity of the story?

A pre-eminent environmental journalist (who shall remain unnamed) told me: “The closer you get to the front page, the less likely it is to be true.” A scary thought indeed, and symptomatic of an incompatible relationship between news culture and environmental science.

Media culture and climate change

Mass media increasingly prioritises entertainment, because entertainment shifts units. It is perceived, with more than a grain of truth, that ‘the audience’ en masse prioritise distraction over information. One way to encourage audience attention is to create conflict, encourage debate and attempt to strike a balance of voices, even when the reality of a situation is self-evident.

The struggle to prolong the presence of climate change on the media agenda is forced to meet the issue of manufactured debate for entertainment head-on. Climate change is not deemed to be news-worthy, at least in the context of events which occur with immediacy and international significance, therefore it is framed as a debate over existence rather than impact.

So many TV spots or column inches place a climate scientist into a discourse of debate with a climate sceptic: These sceptics are never scientists, but politicians or businessmen, sometimes even journalists, always people with an agenda to protect or sell, undermining the scientific reality of climate change for the criteria of entertainment.

Without this inhibiting construct how does climate change stay in the news? Often through scaremongering, the selection of the worst, most extreme findings from hypotheses designed to examine the most hostile planetary prognosis. Not necessarily the most scientifically rigorous, but always provoking the most reaction.

If legitimate climate science is deemed to be lacking the empirical qualities that create news, yet the evidence and scientific examination exists, the discourse of climate change becomes a tiny metal globe on the roulette wheel that is the blogosphere. Some bloggers are able to provide accurate first-hand interpretation of complex ideas which the media refuse to acknowledge. Others have louder voices, less analytical capacity, and amplify the ‘he says/she says’ structure of the entertainment-based news media.

“There is a sense that environmental journalism is about cataloging a decline,” a former environmental correspondent told me, and this is to do with media culture more than the desires and stories offered by the journalists themselves. When the outlets for climate discourse in the media are framed, irrelevant debate or cherry-picking the most extreme information, the possibility of solution-based journalism will always fall by the wayside.