If you look at a London newspaper from 200 years ago you find information about the war against Napoleon. That makes sense as Napoleon, a rampaging imperialist, was seen by most papers as a terrible threat, so naturally they wrote about him.
Two hundred years in the future, if there are still such things as historians, what will they think of us? We face a far graver threat in climate change, and yet our news media, vastly better equipped to report threats than their counterparts in 1810, are behaving as though it isn’t happening.
Global warming has virtually disappeared from the news pages and news bulletins. If you depend on conventional news providers for information about sea temperatures, CO2, glaciers and rainfall patterns, or about what might be done to mitigate climate change, then you probably know next to nothing about what has happened in the past year.
Stories such as the opening of the big Thanet wind farm are not told in a global warming context, and climate change is rarely linked, even in the most cautious way, to the weather and food disasters across the planet. We read about oil and gas in Greenland but not the shocking retreat of the ice.
In the past year, almost the only big climate change story was about the University of East Anglia’s half-baked so-called email scandal.
Whom should we blame? There are the vested interests: the corporations and conservatives who don’t want our way of life to change. They certainly have influence over our media. There are the deniers, mostly friends to the above. There are politicians, scared of hard choices and preferring to keep mum, and the climate scientists, no great shakes at getting their message across.
And then there are the news media, for whom, pretty shamelessly, climate change is yesterday’s story and has been overtaken by something to do with Lady Gaga.
No doubt the media could do much better, and have a responsibility to do so given how badly things are going wrong. The problem is that even for well-meaning journalists the established formulae of their work, its traditions and instincts, make that hard.
Even when you set aside commercial imperatives to sell papers or attract eyeballs, journalism is about reaching out to large numbers of people, connecting with them and informing them. If you fail to do that as a journalist, you are just having a private conversation.
With climate change in 2010, any journalist will find reaching out difficult, because in a sense it’s not news. Yes, deniers have muddied the water and confused people, but that is not the whole story. It is also the case that climate change is big, slow, amorphous, familiar, elusive and continuous — in many ways the antithesis of news.
It’s not like Napoleon in 1810. He was all drama and surprise, astonishing campaigns and high-stakes battles, and better still he was a gaudy, lurid, sensational personality. Now that’s news.
We can say it should be otherwise, and it certainly could be better. But this news factor makes a difference. There may, for all I know, be a conspiracy of silence about climate change, sponsored by vested interests who would undoubtedly be threatened by any effort at mitigation, but it is certainly not the whole story. Even journalists who are desperate to engage the public about the subject at the moment are struggling to do it.
How could this change? The gloomiest and most cynical and likeliest answer is calamity — a calamity so big, so immediate to first-world news consumers, and so unequivocally related to climate change that everybody, at every watercooler in every office wants to be told about it. That, unfortunately, would be news.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
http://twitter.com/BrianCathcart
