Source: News Xchange
URL: N/A
Date: 11/11/2005
Event:News Xchange conference, 2005: What's wrong with TV news coverage of global warming and weather?
Credit: News Xchange
People:
Jon Snow: What Charles said in conclusion [to the INSI Safety session] could easily carry over into the next debate. He talked about the media having no responsibility for making things any worse, and perhaps not even for making things any better. But the thing about this next debate is that the charge is that the media is actively conspiring to destroy the planet by going for weather "porn" rather than going for an understanding of whether there is or is not some kind of global warming. Those of you who are going to discuss the media's potentially irresponsible activity in terms of covering global warming, welcome to our shores. Big round of applause to Ms. [Ayaan Hirsi] Ali for her courage in coming here, and a big round of applause to the rest of the audience for their courage in coming here.
[As many in the audience leave]: The departure of people on the heels of the discussion of the media and Islam will bring great pleasure to George Bush and those in the White House who believe there is no such thing as global warming. There are many in the neo-conservative fraternity and sorority in American society who believe that Islam is the great threat to the planet. I have to bring them some very tragic news, and that is that the issues between the West and Islam are a mite of dust by comparison with the issues that are embroiled in the question of global warming. Global warming really does have the potential to destroy the planet. There is nobody on earth who believes that the breakdown or indeed the making of a dialogue between the West and Islam is going to destroy the planet. So let's get things into proportion and recognise that we now have a further very interesting strand of debate to continue here at News Xchange.
We're going to have a vote, and the question is: Do you personally believe in the existence of manmade climate change? As long as five or six people vote, we know from historic experience in all our broadcasting careers, that that's quite enough to get a perfectly fair sample as to how people think; we shall have an absolutely representative answer on what percentage of people in this room believe there is or is not manmade climate change.
I now want you to indulge a little bit of "weather porn."
[Video of clips from coverage of Hurricane Katrina, floods in Cornwall, and other storms.]
The big question is, do we media people do hurricane and weather porn? Is weather in some way some of the light relief that peppers our news broadcasts? Is it used as some kind of leavening to reduce the tedium of some of the domestic stuff that we have to put up with? Fran Unsworth, you are head of newsgathering at the BBC. Do we take weather seriously?
Fran Unsworth: We actually don't do that much of that stuff. We certainly didn't before Hurricane Katrina anyway. If anything, I'd say that on television news we had a bit of an aversion to covering hurricanes, particularly in the southern states of the U.S.A.
Jon Snow: You've never had anyone on a breakfast news program, standing in a rather fashionable-looking weatherproof jacket blowing around in the wind? Or actually much worse, not blowing around at all but saying a hurricane is actually coming.
Fran Unsworth: I think we're guilty of doing less of it than other broadcasters. It led to us to some extent being slightly late on the Hurricane Katrina story because we just sent a fairly small team to cover it and, of course, it turned into a completely different story, which was about the political reaction to it. Prior to that, we felt that it was an easy hit to cover those stories - everybody speaks English, you can send the Washington bureau, it's too easy.
Jon Snow: BBC spared us major weather porn. Let's turn to Andrew Tyndall and your research. How much do American networks do on the weather?
Andrew Tyndall: My claim to fame is that I'm the only person in the universe who has watched every single nightly newscast of the three American broadcast networks every night since 1987.
Jon Snow: And what are the symptoms?
Andrew Tyndall: I've gone very grey in the process. We measure the news hole of each of the broadcast networks' newscasts, and then we count the stories and the amount of time given to them. There are 15,000 minutes a year in the news hole of the three newscasts combined - 5,000 minutes each. Over the past couple of decades, natural disasters have actually been a small proportion of the news hole - 4 per cent of the entire news hole. This year, however, starting with the [Indian Ocean] tsunami and then going on to Katrina and the hurricane season - it's up to about 14 per cent. So this has been a very heavy year this year. The norm for the entire environment beat - all environment stories - is 2 per cent. Global warming, therefore, is a fraction of 1 per cent.
Jon Snow: Time to put up the results from our first vote - what percentage of us believe there is such a thing as man-generated climate change: 93 per cent [57 people] to 6 per cent [4 people]. A very interesting finding, and that is from people who work in the media. George Monbiot, environmentalist, writer, broadcaster - and rather reassuring.
George Monbiot: I'll be speaking to the 6 per cent afterwards. Climate change is far and away the biggest threat we face now. It has the potential, effectively, to wipe us off the surface of the earth. The ecosphere is a very thin layer on top of the hard rock of the planet, and our entire economy is dependent on it.
Jon Snow: You've got 93 per cent of the people in this room, and they're all people who are extremely active in the making of news and current affairs, who believe there is such a thing as manmade global warming. That's not a bad bedrock to start from.
George Monbiot: Things have changed very rapidly. It wasn't that long ago that the BBC in the United Kingdom just about every time there was a discussion on climate change insisted on bringing on someone who had no scientific qualifications, and was generally funded by Exxon, to say climate change is not taking place - despite the fact that they were flying in the face of a scientific consensus as solid as any scientific consensus becomes. It was the equivalent of, every time you have the issue of smoking and lung cancer on the radio or the television, getting someone on to say there is no connection between smoking and lung cancer. Or the equivalent of getting someone on to say there is no connection between HIV and AIDS every time the issue of AIDS came up. It was grotesquely irresponsible. But I'm glad to say that I think that's passed.
Jon Snow: Fran, you've done a survey on this very issue at the BBC. Is this one of the findings, that there is in fact an extraordinary balance? Here we have 93 per cent to 6 per cent, and yet many programs do tend to try and put on a balancing voice that says there's no such thing as global warming.
Fran Unsworth: We haven't done a survey about that aspect of it, but George is right. We have a duty at the BBC, because we take the licence fee off everybody, to reflect all aspects of an argument. The issue becomes: What weight do you give to different viewpoints? I absolutely agree with George that I think there was a point when it would seem that once we'd got one person setting out the case for manmade global warming and somebody opposing it, that actually the viewer is probably left with the impression that there is equal weight to these arguments. We have now moved on in our coverage of it. There is now a dwindling band of scientists who don't accept that there is manmade global warming. Our editors and our correspondents have moved on.
Jon Snow: When did this move on happen?
Fran Unsworth: I would say probably in the past 12 months to two years.
Jon Snow: When did you move on George? Twenty years ago?
George Monbiot: Yes, 1985 - but [at the BBC] I don't think it's as long as 12 months or two years. I think it's more like five or six months.
Jon Snow: Do you think New Orleans has been a determinant factor?
George Monbiot: I think it has been one. Also, the complete collapse of the global-warming-denying argument has been another, where there just simply aren't credible scientists left who say it's not happening.
Jon Snow: Elizabeth Palmer, CBS correspondent based in London, how much does CBS do on global warming?
Elizabeth Palmer: I think that Katrina was a turning point. When Katrina was coming in and the levees broke in New Orleans, the story was obvious and the immediate breaking news had to be covered. After a while, when all that had to be said was said, reporters on the ground who I talked to, from various networks, began reaching for other things to say about that situation. And one of the things they reached for was the role of global warming. Beyond that - if this is what's going to come more and more our way with global warming, what can we do about it? It was something that simply was not on the news radar in America, before Katrina - for all kinds of reasons, some of them political.
Jon Snow: Not even after Kyoto?
Elizabeth Palmer: Yes, but it was discussed in terms of politics and American unilateralism, as opposed to a genuine scientific story. I think there has been some very good reporting on the issue of climate change in the United States, and I cite the three-part series in the New Yorker magazine - but much less on television. If it's going to come, and I think it will come, it's going to come as a piggyback on genuine news stories in a more conventional sense. They could be technology, typhoons, health - but that way it's going to creep, finally, onto the screens of the nation.
Jon Snow: Let's go to Greenpeace. Greenpeace made a great thing in their early days of really making headway with specific stories about environmental disaster. Then the terrible disaster of Brent Spar came along, and the media stopped believing Greenpeace. Charlie Kronick, what do you think about the growth of media understanding of climate change, piggybacking, as Elizabeth Palmer put it, on the back of other news stories? Is that going to be the way in which people begin to bring the issue into the media?
Charlie Kronick: I think there's almost an inevitability to that. Part of the problem with climate change is that it has been described as an environmental issue. Jon, despite your enthusiasm for environmentalism, when you get to the hard-news agenda, it tends to be pushed aside by domestic politics, by geopolitics and international conflict.
Jon Snow: I was on the ground in New Orleans, and anyone who was there felt it was global warming. Then we tried to reach out and find out whether it was, and there really is a conflict here. We all agree that hurricanes get worse the hotter the sea temperature, and that the sea temperature is at least one degree centigrade hotter than it was one or two decades ago. The problem then is that there are a whole lot of people who come forward and say, "Hang on a minute. There is a cyclical thing with hurricanes, and that cycle is with us at the moment. We can take you back 50 years, and we'll bring the cycle in again." And now the journalists were in some difficulty, because you couldn't be sure it really was global warming.
Charlie Kronick: That's the exact same argument that was made by the climate-change deniers - that there was a natural cycle of climate change and you couldn't tell what was happening.
George Monbiot: Charlie, I think you're mixing up two issues here. While we can be absolutely clear that climate change is taking place, we cannot be absolutely clear that any one event is a result of climate change. And it's quite correct in the case of Katrina to say: "Events like this are more likely to happen," but it's also correct to say: "We don't know whether this one is."
Jon Snow: Everybody in this room is involved in covering events. And if it's hard to pin the thing on an event, it's very hard for us as journalists to say, "Hey there, folks, global warming!" So are you saying it isn't that you want us to say that it is global warming, but to raise the flag that it may be global warming?
George Monbiot: There are some things that you can very plainly label global warming. For instance, a few weeks ago we had the snow and ice data centre in Colorado saying the Arctic ice is smaller than it has ever been in the whole recorded history of humanity and this is definitely global warming. You can pin that on global warming, there's no trouble with that. Any one weather event you cannot pin on global warming, but you can say: "This is consistent with the predictions made by climate scientists for what global warming is likely to do." That's the scientifically correct position.
Jon Snow: I want to go to David Hempleman-Adams, who I think has greater chapter and verse on tangible global warming than anybody it's easy to talk to. But let me first go to Bjorn Lomborg, because you actually think that we're right up the wrong tree.
Bjorn Lomborg: I think the bottom line here is to say: Are we talking about what the media is doing or are we talking about what's actually happening with global warming? Because I definitely disagree with Monbiot on that. I think he's far outside the generally accepted understanding of what global warming is, when he says it's going to wipe us off the face of the earth.
Jon Snow: The issue is not whether you disagree with George's analysis, but whether you disagree with what the media is doing about global warming.
Bjorn Lomborg: Yes, and that's where we have to starting thinking about priorities. There's no doubt that when you look, for instance, at a hurricane, that it's very tempting to say: "That's global warming," but you've also got to ask yourself, "How much of that ...?" Even if we allow ourselves to believe the worst sort of assumptions that, for instance, you see from George Monbiot, that means that within the next 50 to 100 years, the increase in the cost of damages from climate change and hurricanes, is going to account for from 1 to 5 per cent of the total increase. The other 95 to 99 per cent of the cost will come from the fact that we live closer to seashores, that we have much more of value, that we build not according to code and other of those social demands. So what is it that media should be reporting? Should they be reporting: "Oh god, this is global warming, we should do something about it." Or: "Oh God, we haven't actually dealt with this with our infrastructure, and actually dealing with 95 to 99 per cent of the problems that will come in the years to come."
Jon Snow: Fran Unsworth, I'm not sure that that has made your job any easier.
Fran Unsworth: No. Exactly the point I was going to make. I think this discussion illustrates very clearly the dilemmas that journalists find themselves in, because of the conflicting arguments that surround this and the difficulties of getting to any kind of way of guiding audiences through it. That's why we have experts, of course, on our staff, to assess the weight of all these arguments. I actually think these points are not in conflict with each other anyway. Clearly something of what's going on in the environment surrounds some of the issues that Bjorn is talking about probably. On the other hand, scientists also are pretty convinced that global warming is caused by manmade factors.
Jon Snow: Let's go to David Hempleman-Adams, because you think we're letting the viewer down anyway.
David Hempleman-Adams: I don't think we've seen enough about global warming, from my own experience. I went up to the Arctic in 1980 and then I went up again last year - and, in that time, there is one-third less pack ice. I was going over the Brazilian rain forest back in the early 1980s, went flying over it again last year, and there's an area the size of France that we've cut down. So we are seeing huge devastation in a really small amount of time, 20 years.
Jon Snow: I think you'd accept that there has been, not a huge amount, but a fair amount of coverage of both Antarctic and Arctic ice melt. The problem, surely, is what do we do after that? I know from my own experience that there's only a limited amount of large chunks of ice falling into water, polar bears swimming, even your good self dragging a sledge - there's only a limit to how much of that you can keep putting on the air, because it all looks the same as the last time we saw it. We then have to push on somehow, to try to link what you're experiencing in the Arctic to what we are doing in our kitchens or in our cars or whatever else to bring that about. That's a big challenge, isn't it?
David Hempleman-Adams: I absolutely agree. And when you were talking about Katrina, all the stories were about the human suffering and not actually about the weather or what caused it. You can talk to different meteorologists and they can say: "We're coming up to an ice age or we're going into this cycle of ice ages." But all the meteorologists I talked to, all the experts, they all believe that in this really short time, 20 years, we've devastated the climate. It shouldn't be happening that fast. So we have to try and link, somehow, these tornadoes, Katrina and anything else that's going to come up in the next five years, and try and relate that to global warming.
Jon Snow: Elizabeth Palmer, it feels dangerously close to a news story.
Elizabeth Palmer: I think that, for the American channels, for it to get the coverage it deserves it has to pass the "so what?" test.
Jon Snow: You mean: "So what? Your grandchildren are going to be dead."
Elizabeth Palmer: People need to know what to do about it. As you pointed out, sitting in our kitchens and living rooms, it's all very well to be told that cataclysmic things are happening, but in order for it to begin to make a difference, it has to become a political story and a prescriptive story. There have to be people with some gravitas saying: "We've gotta do this." And if the government doesn't want to, then let us now cover the fight. Just as a story of enormous, apocalyptic change, it should concern us. I don't think it does.
Jon Snow: Charlie Kronick, it's got no "so what?" factor.
Charlie Kronick: Bizarrely, I think that's true. And even more bizarrely, I almost agree with Bjorn Lomborg. But the problem with climate change is that it has been expressed as an environmental issue, which means that it can be put off in the environmental ghetto. What Katrina taught us very clearly is that it's vulnerable communities that pay the price. Now, vulnerable communities in Africa, in Latin America, in South Asia, have been paying the price. This is the first time that a vulnerable community in the centre of the media world, in North America, has been at the centre of this. When climate change will become a news item that you can't escape is when the realisation increases that you can't separate it from issues of poverty, issues of global trade or issues of health. And even, bizarrely, if you look at the oil price, it skyrocketed after Katrina because of the impact on the oil infrastructure. It's not just getting dangerously close to a real news story, it's getting dangerously close to real politics.
Jon Snow: You're letting people down, Elizabeth. He said it.
Elizabeth Palmer: It's a story that is multifaceted. I have confidence that it's going to come up and it's going to be part of the daily dialogue of news. I don't know when that will happen, but I can tell you that it has already come up in Canada, for example, as a defence-policy story, because all of a sudden Canada has an Arctic it is not at all equipped to defend. So it's going to creep onto screens in disguise.
Jon Snow: Andrew, do you divine these signs, that it will suddenly become the daily staple?
Andrew Tyndall : I would press this argument even further and say that it's actually better not to cover global warming as a story. It's better to cover it as an angle of all the other stories. The word to newsrooms would be: Don't try and lobby for an increased environmental beat, so we can do more features, sending the person up to the Arctic, because you'll get that on once every couple of months and it'll be down at the bottom of the news program on a light news day and it won't be, when there are the big headlines. The lesson from the tsunami was that it's coastal populations who are vulnerable. I say what you do is make it the third bullet point of your story on oil prices, on transportation, on hurricanes, on anything to do with coastal residents. That's the way you get global warming covered, not as a story itself.
George Monbiot: I'm suspicious of that approach for two reasons. The first is that that was exactly what the BBC said it was going to do in 1992. It said: "Don't worry about the fact that we're not doing dedicated environmental coverage; we're going to embed the environmental coverage in everything else." They totally failed to do so, and effectively let themselves off the hook by making that promise.
The second reason is that unless an issue divides the major parties, it's very hard to make that issue news unless you're intending to make it news. One of the problems we have in almost all developed economies is that the major parties don't really want to do very much about it. They will stand up and say, "Yes, it's very worrying and something should be done." But in both the United States and in the United Kingdom, there is an agreement - even in the U.S. now - that something should be done about it, but very little determination on the part of either party to push that. And that leaves news journalists with a problem, because if they're trying to make climate change part of their everyday coverage, the political parties aren't giving them that opening.
Jon Snow: Maybe we shouldn't even leave it to politics. Fran Unsworth, here's an example. I was watching the telly yesterday and what was on it? Stella McCartney's new fashion release to H&M stores in London, and people flocking in to get this stuff. It was an absolutely nonsensical report, in which I didn't think the stuff even looked very nice and the people looked decidedly unhappy buying it, but they cleared the shelves and that was that. Now, let us imagine that we send someone along with some brief to reflect the global-warming aspect of Stella McCartney's set of clothes arriving on the shelves in Oxford Street. One: Air miles to get the clothes from Taiwan, China, wherever, to the shelves. What was the cost in ozone demolition to get this stuff there speedily - had to come by air because it was a quick new release of fashion, so didn't come by sea. Can you imagine a BBC newscast that, as a natural matter of course, reflects that the new Ford Fiesta has an environmentally destructive level of 0.89 per cent - or whatever.
Fran Unsworth: I can, actually, to be quite honest. I think it would be an interesting approach, which I can easily see on Newsnight, and I think that we do that kind of thing quite often. George said we bottled out of environmental coverage since 1992. I just can't see that. We have five environment correspondents who are working alone for network news, and we have another 11 or so who are working in the English regions. So I don't think we can be accused of not committing ourselves to environmental coverage.
Your point is a good one, about how many polar-bear pieces you can end up seeing on the screen. The way to approach it is the way that we have been approaching it, which is to kick it into the realm of other specialisms. We get our economics correspondents to look at what the impact of development in India and China is going to be on the environment. Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, our China correspondent, did a piece about how the Chinese are hoping to cope with an increase in energy needs by developing clean-coal power stations. This is the multifaceted approach that you were talking about, which frankly I think the BBC are already doing.
Jon Snow: Do you think they are?
Andrew Tyndall: I don't monitor the BBC, but I just want to say that the point about whether this issue gets covered when it's a political struggle or not is vindicated by my American data. The way I explain it is this: Environmental coverage has a low level, generally speaking, in the news hole. However, if we look at the last 20 years, the eight years of the Clinton administration - generally environmentalists were happier with that administration - the coverage went down even lower. If you look at the bookends of the two Bushes, environmental coverage is higher. When environmentalists are politically active in protesting the issues of the government, that's when environmental stories rise up in the news hole. In other words, when it is made political, that's when you get more visibility.
Jon Snow: Bjorn, what do you make of what you've heard? We've got an undertaking here from a few broadcasters that they're going to try and weave what's happening to global warming into mainstream coverage.
Bjorn Lomborg: Quite frankly, I'm a little surprised at this whole discussion about how we can we get this into mainstream coverage; what's our lobby strategy?; and we're suspicious of how the BBC does this. Presumably what broadcasters actually want is to try and present the best evidence so that we can make good judgements. And the idea that was the premise for this discussion was: To what extent are we over-focusing on something that looks good on TV but perhaps is not good at making us understand it? I was arguing, with the hurricanes, that we end up focusing on the 1 to 5 per cent about what we can do and forgetting the 95 to 99 per cent.