Few of us want to face the climate mess. The numbers are scary and confusing, and the facts have never been reported in a way that actually generates public understanding. “The media are complacent while the world burns,” Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope declare in the Columbia Journalism Review. There’s plenty of data to back up this bold assertion: based on an analysis of 600 New York Times articles on climate change, a UC Berkeley report states that “the vast majority contained none of the five basic climate facts,” meaning that readers are left uneducated about the truth and scope of the problem. (The five criteria the researchers used are that global warming is happening, that burning fossil fuels produces greenhouse gases that create warming, that 90%+ of climate scientists agree on the human causes of warming, that there is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been for hundreds of thousands of years, and that warming is permanent.)
It’s not just a lack of effective information: many media movers and shakers claim that climate coverage is “a palpable ratings killer” in the first place, and so they tend to curtail or water down their coverage. Of course there are exceptions—an article in New York by David Wallace-Wells beat the supposed “traffic Kryptonite” curse (over 6 million hits, which led to his book The Uninhabitable Earth). Wallace-Wells has stated that “being alarmed is what the facts demand.” …
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