How the Media Abandoned the Environment
No, you’re not imagining things.
With U.S. gasoline prices edging toward $4.00 a gallon; oil prices at an all-time high, demand for materials such as copper outstripping demand; worldwide food shortages; major cities running short on water; Antarctic ice sheets crumbling into the Southern Ocean; and continued uncertainty over our climatological future, you’d think the environment would be front-and-center on the evening news. And you’d be wrong.
Sure, there’s some reporting on spotty gas lines and store chains placing minor restrictions on rice purchases. But the policy failures which are already being felt in the stomachs of the developing world — and will eventually become obvious elsewhere — are hardly ever discussed. Nor are the tremendous advances in clean and green technology which will hold such promise for the coming decades.
What a difference a year makes
Just 14 months ago, Hollywood rolled up to the Academy Awards in electric cars and hybrid limos to laud An Inconvenient Truth. By summer, it was nonstop coverage of the Live Earth climate concerts. Advertisers were falling all over themselves to slap green stickers on their products, and the media was all but pronouncing the penguin and polar bear extinct.
Then came the inevitable blowback from radio talk show hosts, politicians, and indistrialist talking heads. Perhaps, also, the general public — suffering a green hangover from too much eco-marketing and inflated claims on both sides of the climate change issue. By autumn, the press had moved on to follow presidential hopefuls, not the environment.
A real decline in environmental and science reporting
If you’re reading EcoTech Daily, you’ve probably sensed for some time that the mainstream media has largely abandoned environmental science coverage. Now there are some hard numbers which show the issue’s consignment to the back page.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism — a nonpartisan group affiliated with the Pew Research Center in Washington, DC — has just released a study tracking the editorial direction of the Wall Street Journal since its purchase by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. In the process, they’ve turned up statistics showing just how little environmental news is deemed worthy of editorial attention at both the WSJ and the New York Times.
Surveying front page stories at the WSJ between 12 August and 12 December, 2007, the Project discovered that five percent of the paper’s reporting could be categorized as Science/Technology or the Environment. The study then tracked these issues for a three-month period beginning 13 December — the day Murdoch took control. Coverage declined by over half, to 2.1 percent.
This isn’t an aberration. The project also surveyed the front page editorial content of the New York Times between December and March. The NYT’s coverage of Science/Technology and the Environment clocked in even lower than the WSJ: 1.8 percent.
Out of step with the real world
Admittedly, there’s a lot of political news as the United States prepares for this November’s general election. But even in the context of presidential debates and a heated congressional campaign, environmental reporting has been pushed off the front page.
The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are two of the world’s most influential news organizations: their reporting helps set the tone for both print and electronic media. Their editorial abandonment of the environment both reflects and guides the media at large.
All this is happening at a time of unparalleled progress in environmental technology and business. Corporations have genuinely embraced sustainability as a necessary component of profitability. The CleanTech and green collar sector is roaring ahead, and there’s no shortage of meaningful advances in the fields of alternative energy, clean transportation, and resource conservation. Green has transcended its utopian roots to become a real bridge to the future.
The new environmental media
To a degree, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times’ disconnect with environmental issues speaks to the decline of traditional mass media. No longer the gatekeepers of public discourse, print and electronic broadcast media are enduring sharp reversals in readership, viewers, and revenues. In response, mass media increasingly relies on the sensational to prop up the exodus of their core consumers.
Reporting is now more about conflict and drama than the issues from which they extend. The transformation of news from information to entertainment — and the corrosive effect of this process on the guilded remnants of traditional news brands — can be observed in the long decline of the once-great CBS News, former home to Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. There will be other failures.
With this transition, though, comes the rise of a new web-based media. Decentralized, specialized, and interactive, new media is steadily taking possession of the fields abandoned by its predecessor.
In terms of environmental reporting, there are already clear leaders: stalwarts, such as Grist and Treehugger; EcoGeek, for green tech; Jetson Green and Inhabitat in the fields of sustainable design and construction; the Green Options family of eco blogs; and the dozens of independent and corporate-owned environmental voices you’ll see quoted here on EcoTech Daily.
So the cycle begins anew. Thank you for being part of the Green Revolution.
Read more:
How Different is Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal? (Project for Excellence in Journalism)
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Comment by Jolly Green Girl on 29 April 2008:
excellent article and point Chris. I can not believe that gas prices are soaring and the government is doing nothing about it. The profit the gas execs made last year is staggering and yet we are all taking it without a peep.
With the economy in shambles and staying in a losing war; it seems the environment has been pushed to the side. But with posts like these.. hopefully we can still be active with our voices and pen.
Comment by nishland on 29 April 2008:
Great article! I believe the media has abandoned much more than the environment. These days they tend to favor sex, destruction, and entertainment over the things that really matter most. People want to be informed
Comment by Preston on 29 April 2008:
I see the stats you’re quoting, but I also feel NYT and WSJ are doing more. I see tons of green interest stories on NY Times, and I’ll even get a pretty good green story from WSJ, too. Plus, NYT has Tom Friedman and Dot Earth — they’re doing some good things right now.
Also, a lot of the green movement right now seems so lifestyle based, and perhaps these newspapers just aren’t interested in catering to that crowd. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think there are business stories relating to the environment that need to be told, but I’m just thinking out loud …
Pingback by Categorization of Dutch newspapers | Edward de Leau on 29 April 2008:
[...] I saw the table I found here, I was actually thinking of making an overview of all Dutch newspapers and see the division in [...]
Comment by severebeef on 29 April 2008:
Journalism is dead. Thank you so much for another batch of yellow journalism for clicks.
Pingback by alexlockwood.net » Blog Archive » Media’s responsibility to climate change on 30 April 2008:
[...] EcoTechDaily also picked up on the story, with a strong headine line that the media had abandoned the environment. It feels like it sometimes. They highlight the differences between the NYT and the WSJ, but [...]
Comment by Alex on 30 April 2008:
Thanks for bringing this to wider attention. You may be interested in some similar academic research and media coverage coming out of the UK this week, looking at the failure of the UK tabloid press to cover the climate change issue. The Sun over here is owned by NewsCorp/Murdoch.
I’ve pulled together some of the stories and academic research pieces on a blog entry
Cheers.
Trackback by nerdd.net | news and opinion on 30 April 2008:
How the Media Abandoned the Environment | nerdd.net…
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Comment by BGreen on 30 April 2008:
Very good read this morning, but have a question. Has anyone ever done a study of the environmental cost of the US Elections process? Not only is it a horrible waste of time and public dollars, but the environmental cost is shameful! Talk about a carbon footprint ;~(
Thanks for your continuing efforts to share green news!
Bonnie
Comment by Chris Baskind on 30 April 2008:
@BGreen: After the 2008 U.S. Presidential primary season, I don’t think you’ll find too many people who wouldn’t go for a shorter election cycle.
Comment by MyJoy on 30 April 2008:
Unfortunately, the protecting/saving the environment requires the kind of sacrifices that existed during World War 2
- rationing of carbon producing items including
- gas, fertilizer, food, plastics
- recycling drives
- victory gardens
- forced deprivation
Coming out of the Great Depression it was probably easier [maybe not welcome] to impose the required restrictions. The government manipulated/co-opted the media to aid the war effort.
Newspaper owners probably know that such actions taken today would affect their revenues greatly and society as a whole, so have little interest in promoting conservation/simplicity.
Comment by Uncle B on 1 May 2008:
You address people that spend their days in air-conditioned offices, drive home behind windshields of their heated cars to the ‘burbs and run into their climate controlled homes, about environmental issues. These in-debt, worry laden, over caffeinated,over fed, under exercised, over achieving slaves to industry need to go to the country for a month just to get in touch with what ‘environment’ means, but right now the corporate world has them held as tight as it will go, and if they skip one breath, they will lose it all! And, we want to export this lifestyle to the Iraqis - no damn wonder they aren’t biting!
Pingback by Media’s responsbility to climate change : injournalism on 13 May 2008:
[...] EcoTechDaily also picked up on the story, with a strong headine line that the media had abandoned the environment. It feels like it sometimes. They highlight the differences between the NYT and the WSJ, but [...]
Comment by Diane Hockenberry on 29 August 2008:
While I think your comments are interesting and you can't argue with fact when it comes to the number of headlines focusing on green issues, I find it in contradiction with Murdoch's actual business policies in an attempt to be more eco-friendly. He's leading the charge in the media industry when it comes to this topic, by vowing to make News Corp carbon neutral by 2010 and switching their distribution fleet to all hybrids. Before I chastise Murdoch completely for changes in coverage, I'd take a step back and look at his business practices that seem to tell a different story.