Balanced coverage - telling both sides of the story - is widely considered one of the pillars of professional journalism. However, when applied to global warming, telling both sides of the story doesn’t help.
Global warming is still being discussed in the news media. Sadly, the discussion is all too often about whether or not global warming even exists. Scientists, however, do not discuss global warming. For them it is a fact. This begs the question…do reporters (for the most part in the US) do a bad job when writing about global warming? Indeed, they do try to follow the journalistic standard of objectivity…objectivity in the media requires that both sides are equally heard. In the case of global warming, journalists talk to scientists and those who deny global warming. The two sides of the issue are being heard, but the result is not better reporting in this case. The result is confusion. After choosing 928 articles from the journal of Science published over a period of 10 years, Geologist Naomi Oreskes did not discover one article that disagreed with the assertion that human activity causes global warming. Jules and Maxwell Boykoff also analyzed the articles of four leading U.S. newspapers over 14 years. They reviewed 3542 articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times on global warming. For their analysis they chose randomly 636 articles. In 2004 they published their results: About 53 % of the articles gave equal weight to the opposing side - which provided opinions that were often funded by the oil & gas industry - creating an impression in the minds of readers that there was a debate about global warming.
In case you have not yet seen the new ads for the wecansolveit campaign (funded by The Alliance for Climate ProtectionI love how they have done a spoof on Apples Mac vs. Windows (check it out below). I have not yet seen or heard much of the marketing campaign over here in Euroland, so the focus seems to be squarely on the US for the moment…this makes sense strategically as the US is still the worlds biggest polluter. From Al Gore’s blog it seems that the marketing campaign is pretty standard, mixing in TV, print, online, etc. The campaign appears to be on the right track with over a million people signing up to help get climate change under control. I would encourage you to go sign up…
Below is Al Sharpton vs Pat Robertson (who is the Mac? )
On m-cause, I write about marketing, society and culture (and a host of other random stuff). You can find me on twitter @RyanMacJones.
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Exxon, in particular, speaks with a forked tongue.
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