U.S.: Blame the media for climate woes: analysis
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Blame the media for climate woes: analysis
Mike De Souza
CanWest News Service
Sunday, August 05, 2007
OTTAWA - Mainstream U.S. media are to blame for stalled international efforts to reach an agreement to fight climate change, according to a new analysis released by a media watchdog group.
The report, in the latest edition of a magazine published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, said there are multiple examples of major American media organizations watering down recent warnings from peer-reviewed scientific literature about the consequences of global warming and the human-produced pollution that is causing it.
The watchdog group based its analysis on a comparison of American and British headlines and articles about the release of a series of international reports that assessed the latest peer-reviewed on climate change.
"Where U.K. media generally presented climate change as an urgent crisis that requires immediate action, in the U.S. it's still widely portrayed as an unresolved debate," says the article, written by Neil deMause in the July-August edition of Extra!.
The coverage is helping to prop up U.S. government policies which suggest aggressive action to tackle climate change could be economically costly, deMause said. For example, he explained that many Americans were unaware of a British government study by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern that warned the cost of doing nothing would be much worse than immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
"The Stern report is something that has been hashed out in the British and Canadian media and argued back and forth, whereas in the U.S., nobody has heard of it," said deMause in an interview. "That's the problem. It's not particularly what stand the media takes on what should we do about climate change, it's the information is getting out about climate change, and I think that in the U.S., it's a very limited debate."
He added that the lack of information helps ease the pressure on the U.S. government to accept a new international climate change treaty with binding caps on greenhouse gas pollution.
"The worry of course is that the U.S. is the 700-pound gorilla here, and to some degree, until the U.S. starts making moves, other nations, (such as) India and China, are going to be resistant to doing any thing substantial," he said. "The U.S. really holds a lot of the cards here, aside from the fact, of course, that the U.S. is the biggest creator of carbon."
James Hoggan, a public relations consultant who set up a website, www.desmogblog.com, to debunk arguments of climate skeptics, said Canadian media are getting better at weeding out comments from industry-endorsed groups and think tanks by focusing instead on the conclusions of peer-reviewed research.
But Hoggan, whose clients include David Suzuki's environmental foundation, said many reporters still have work to do when it comes to explaining the basics of climate change science.
"Only a very small percentage of Canadians would associate climate change with heat-trapping gases, but a greater percentage of Canadians might (incorrectly) associate it with something like aerosol cans or the hole in the ozone. Canadians also may think it has something to do with the heat that's generated by factories or machines."
He said he's also starting to worry about companies and politicians that are claiming to be taking action to fight climate change when in reality, they aren't really doing anything.
He said his blog will start to pay more attention to these issues, with a particular focus on U.S. policy and developments in the fall.
© CanWest News Service 2007
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