{"id":528524,"date":"2010-04-15T11:14:20","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T15:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/climateprogress.org\/?p=23022"},"modified":"2010-04-15T11:14:20","modified_gmt":"2010-04-15T15:14:20","slug":"straight-up-how-the-press-bungles-its-coverage-of-climate-economics-must-read-again-study-%e2%80%9cthe-media%e2%80%99s-decision-to-play-the-stenographer-role-helped-opponents-of-climate-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/528524","title":{"rendered":"Straight Up: How the press bungles its coverage of climate economics – Must-read (again) study: \u201cThe media\u2019s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cover<\/a>In January 2009, I blogged on a remarkable study by a leading journalist documenting the media’s mistakes and biases during the 2008 Senate debate of the Lieberman-Warner climate bill.\u00a0 I posted it again last May since the media repeated<\/a> the exact<\/a> same mistakes<\/a> in the debate over the House bill.\u00a0 I included it in my new book <\/em>“Straight Up” — and am reposting it here — to set the table for the <\/em>roll out in the next several days of the <\/em>bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill <\/em>by Senators Graham (R-SC), Kerry (D-MA), and Lieberman (I-CT).<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/span>One of the country\u2019s leading journalists has written a searing critique of the media\u2019s coverage of global warming, especially climate economics.<\/p>\n

How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change<\/em><\/a> is by Eric Pooley for Harvard\u2019s prestigious Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Pooley has been managing editor of Fortune<\/em>, national editor of Time<\/em>, Time<\/em>\u2019s chief political correspondent, and Time<\/em>\u2019s White House correspondent, where he won the Gerald Ford Prize for Excellence in Reporting. Before that, he was senior editor of New York<\/em> magazine.<\/p>\n

In short, Pooley has earned the right to be heard. Journalists and senior editors need to pay heed to Pooley\u2019s three tough conclusions abut how \u201cdamaging\u201d the recent media of the climate debate has been:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The press misrepresented the economic debate over cap and trade<\/strong>. It failed to recognize the emerging consensus \u2026 that cap and trade would have a marginal effect on economic growth and gave doomsday forecasts coequal status with nonpartisan ones\u2026. The press allowed opponents of climate action to replicate the false debate over climate science in the realm of climate economics<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  2. The press failed to perform the basic service of making climate policy and its economic impact understandable to the reader and allowed opponents of climate action to set the terms of the cost debate<\/strong>. The argument centered on the short-term costs of taking action\u2013i.e., higher electricity and gasoline prices\u2013and sometimes assumed that doing nothing about climate change carried no cost<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  3. Editors failed to devote sufficient resources to the climate story. In general, global warming is still being shoved into the \u201cenvironment\u201d pigeonhole, along with the spotted owls and delta smelt, <\/strong>when it is clearly to society\u2019s detriment to think about the subject that way. It is time for editors to treat climate policy as a permanent, important beat: tracking a mobilization for the moral equivalent of war.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Precisely.<\/p>\n

    Pooley is one of the few major journalists in the country who understands that global warming is the story of the century \u2014 and if we don\u2019t reverse our emissions path soon, it will likely be the story of the millennium, with irreversible impacts lasting for many, many centuries (see \u201cIntro to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water<\/a>\u201c and “NOAA stunner: Climate change \u201clargely irreversible for 1000 years,\u201d with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe<\/a>“).<\/p>\n

    Pooley told me, \u201cI think this is the only story going forward.\u201d That\u2019s why he has been devoting most of his time to researching and writing a book on the politics and economics of climate change.<\/p>\n

    The first step for Pooley was an analysis of media coverage over the previous 15 months. In a long introduction to the different roles reporters can play, Pooley notes:<\/p>\n

    \n

    Being a referee is harder than being a stenographer because it requires grappling with the substance of an issue in a way that many time-pressed journalists aren\u2019t willing or able to do.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    He decided to examine media coverage surrounding the 2008 Senate debate over the climate bill put forward by John Warner (R-VA) and Joseph Lieberman (??-CT):<\/p>\n

    \n

    News coverage of the Lieberman-Warner debate included some shoddy, one-sided reporting and some strong work that took the time both to dive into the policy weeds\u2013evaluating the economic assumptions used by the various players\u2013and step back to portray those players as com-batants in a war for public opinion. But most of the reporting was bad in the painstakingly balanced way of so much daily journalism\u2013two sides, no real meat.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    He then explains his research:<\/p>\n

    \n

    My analysis of news articles published in national and regional newspapers, wire services, and newsmagazines between December 2007 and June 2008 suggests that for most reporters covering this story, the default role was that of stenographer\u2013presenting a nominally balanced view of the debate without questioning the validity of the arguments, sometimes even ignoring evidence that one side was twisting truth. <\/strong>Database searches yielded a sample of 40 published news and analysis stories that explored the cost debate in some de-tail (see appendix). Of these, seven stories were one-sided. Twenty-four stories were works of journalistic stenography. And nine stories attempted, with varying degrees of success, to move past the binary debate, weigh the arguments, and reach conclusions about this thorny issue.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    The bottom line:<\/p>\n

    \n

    The media\u2019s collective decision to play the stenographer role actually helped opponents of climate action stifle progress<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    He makes another interesting point, one I would not have expected from a journalist<\/p>\n

    \n

    Mainstream news organizations have accepted the conclusions of the IPCC but have not yet applied those conclusions to the economic debate<\/strong>. The terms of that debate have been defined by opponents of climate action who argue that reducing emissions would \u201ccost too much.\u201d So the battle has been fought over the short-term price of climate action and its impact on GDP, while overlooking an extremely important variable, the long-term costs of inaction and business as usual.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Although Pooley doesn\u2019t make the point, the problem he identifies is compounded by the fact that the mainstream economic community also overestimates the cost of action and underestimates the cost of inaction, a central point of my ongoing series on voodoo economists (see, for instance, Part 3: MIT and NBER \u2014 the right wing deniers love your work. Ask yourself \u201cwhy?\u201d<\/a> and Part 2: Robert Mendelsohn says global warming is \u201ca good thing for Canada.\u201d<\/a>).<\/p>\n

    That means when the media goes out looking for a well-known climate economist to quote in an article, they typically end up with someone who doesn\u2019t understand the scientific urgency and those who misunderstand the economics.<\/p>\n

    If you really want to understand the fact that even a very strong cap and trade bill \u201cwould have a marginal effect on economic growth,\u201d the best place to go is the the International Energy Agency<\/a> and IPCC<\/a> and McKinsey (see \u201cMcKinsey 2008 Research in Review: Stabilizing at 450 ppm has a net cost near zero<\/a>\u201c).<\/p>\n

    Pooley\u2019s whole paper is a must read, especially for advocates of climate action. Yes, the media bears much culpability for the fact that, as Pooley says, \u201cthe tipping point for climate action has not yet been reached.\u201d But so do scientists, environmentalists, and progressives. The general state of our messaging remains lousy (see, for instance, Part 4: The idiocy of crowds or, rather, the idiocy of (crowded) debates<\/a> and Does the \u201cReality Campaign\u201d need new Mad Men?<\/a><\/p>\n

    One clear message from this study is that the climate science activists need to do a better job of spelling out the cost of inaction. <\/strong>Until that cost is clear to the public, the media, and policymakers, the country will never be able to mobilize to do what is needed to preserve a livable climate.<\/p>\n

    Related Post:<\/p>\n