{"id":3668,"date":"2019-05-01T18:54:56","date_gmt":"2019-05-01T18:54:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/?p=3668"},"modified":"2019-05-01T18:58:31","modified_gmt":"2019-05-01T18:58:31","slug":"the-media-is-failing-on-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/2019\/05\/01\/the-media-is-failing-on-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"The Media is Failing on Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Here’s how they can do better ahead of 2020<\/em>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: Young protestors hold placards at the office of U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell during a Green New Deal demonstration (Michael Brochstein\/SOPA Images\/REX\/Shutterstock)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Guardian<\/a><\/em>
by Emily Holden<\/p>\n\n\n\n

America elected Donald Trump at the end of the hottest year\u00a0ever recorded<\/a>, without debate moderators asking him a single question about global warming.

But after three years of record temperatures, devastating wildfires and some of the most destructive hurricanes in US history, the media is facing new pressure \u2013 often from the candidates themselves \u2013 to give the subject more prominence during the 2020 election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yesterday, MSNBC devoted more than five minutes to Beto O\u2019Rourke\u2019s rollout of a $5tn climate plan, calling climate a \u201ckitchen table issue\u201d for 2020. Jay Inslee, the Washington governor who is seeking to make climate change the central thrust of his campaign, is calling on the\u00a0Democratic National Committee<\/a>\u00a0to host a debate solely focused on climate. Bernie Sanders raised the issue during his town hall on Fox News earlier this month \u2013 and even\u00a0drew cheers from the audience<\/a> when he talked about new jobs in the renewable energy sector. Rising temperatures and the crisis they pose for humans were part of every Democratic candidate\u2019s pitch during CNN\u2019s marathon of hour-long town halls<\/a>\u00a0last week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the run-up to 2020, as newsroom leaders grapple with their mistakes in the 2016 election \u2013 from reliance on inaccurate polls to underestimating the impact of fake news \u2013 the failure to press candidates on climate change is emerging as an area of self-examination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn 2016 there were almost no questions asked , which is insane,\u201d says Tony Bartelme, a senior reporter who covers climate change for the Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. \u201cIt\u2019s a good start that we\u2019re starting to hear questions for 2020.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Guardian is joining forces with\u00a0Columbia Journalism Review<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0the Nation<\/a> to launch Covering Climate Change: A New Playbook for a 1.5-Degree World,<\/a>\u00a0a project aimed at dramatically improving US media coverage of the climate crisis. The project kicks off today with\u00a0an event at Columbia Journalism School<\/a>\u00a0featuring CJR\u2019s editor-in-chief, Kyle Pope, the Nation\u2019s environment correspondent, Mark Hertsgaard, and the Guardian climate columnist Bill McKibben.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Green New Deal \u2013 progressives\u2019 vision for slowing climate change without further burdening the poor \u2013 has also helped catapult the subject into the 2020 conversation. In March, MSNBC\u2019s Chris Hayes took the highly unusual step of devoting\u00a0an hour<\/a>\u00a0to the idea, in a show featuring the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even as there are signs that airtime for climate is beginning to increase, questions remain about the depth and quality of the coverage. \u201cI don\u2019t see the media paying much attention to differentiating how serious each candidate is on the climate question,\u201d said David Gelber, the creator and executive producer for the Showtime series on climate change,\u00a0Years Of Living Dangerously<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More Americans than ever are\u00a0worried<\/a>\u00a0about climate change. A poll of likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa ranked climate change about on par with healthcare as the\u00a0top issues<\/a> they want candidates to talk about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research indicates that major national newspapers are beginning to pay more attention to climate \u2013 but local publications and TV news haven\u2019t kept up. The major broadcast networks \u2013 ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX \u2013 spent just\u00a0142 minutes<\/a>\u00a0on climate change last year, according to one calculation from the progressive group Media Matters. And about half of Americans hear about global warming in the media\u00a0once a month or less,<\/a> according to surveys by climate communications programs at Yale and George Mason universities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, five major national US newspapers \u2013 the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times \u2013 have, in aggregate, roughly tripled their coverage of climate change since four years ago, according to the\u00a0Media and Climate Change Observatory<\/a> at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Read more …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s how they can do better ahead of 2020 Photo: Young protestors hold placards at the office of U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell during a Green New Deal demonstration (Michael Brochstein\/SOPA Images\/REX\/Shutterstock) The Guardianby Emily Holden America elected Donald Trump at … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-11-04 11:17:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3668"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3671,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3668\/revisions\/3671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}