This is the text of an op-ed article by me published in the Irish Times on November 25, 2015. An online version of the article is available here.
There is one conundrum related to climate change that has intrigued communications researchers for over 30 years. It can be summed up simply: given that climate change poses such a threat to our planet and our species, why is it largely ignored by the media?
Ignored, I can hear you snort? But you can’t open a newspaper, browse social media or listen to the radio without hearing about melting glaciers or the upcoming climate change conference in Paris.
Yes, there is a lot about climate change in the media just at the moment. Research shows that coverage of climate change peaks around international conferences and the release of IPCC reports.
Yet at other times, it all but disappears, especially in Ireland. One survey shows that it accounted for just 0.84pc of total news coverage in The Irish Times between 1997 and 2010.
My own research into Irish media coverage of climate change shows that, by comparison with Europe, coverage by the Irish national newspapers of climate change is low.
In 2007, European coverage of climate change was almost three times that of coverage in Ireland, at 138.2 versus 47.5 stories per title per month. In the late-2009, early-2010 period, European coverage had dipped to twice that of Ireland. Since then, the gap has widened again. The latest figures in my research show that, by the end of last year, Irish coverage stood at 10.6 stories per title per month, compared to 58.4 in the rest of Europe.
Of the Irish national titles, The Irish Times gives by far the most extensive coverage of climate change. It publishes twice as many stories related to climate change as the Irish Independent, which is in second place.
The Irish Examiner is third in the coverage, with the Irish Daily Mail in fourth, and the Sunday Business Post in fifth. The Sunday Independent, the most widely read of all the country’s print titles, has the fewest mentions of climate change, sometimes going for a month or more without referring to the issue at all.
It must be pointed out that this research records basic “mentions” of climate change. It does not address context, so the mentions could be in an article denying the man-made element of climate change, for instance, or in a letter to the editor rejoicing in a spell of warm weather that the writer attributes to global warming.
Why is the coverage of climate change so low? And not just in Ireland. Coverage in the global south is also negligible, and even in countries with sophisticated media systems such as the US and the UK, it struggles to gain a foothold on the news agenda.
The answer is as complex as the question is simple. Some studies suggest that the ideological orientation of the news organization itself informs its climate change coverage, so newspapers with a business-as-usual worldview are less likely to cover climate change in the first place, and when they do, they are less likely to advocate sweeping changes to markets and energy systems.
Another theory is that environmental problems have a natural “attention cycle” among readers. The stages are: the pre-problem stage, the alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm stage, the realizing the cost of significant progress stage and the gradual decline of interest stage.
Climate change has been in the public eye for so long – it first gained widespread media coverage (as global warming) in 1988 – that it has probably gone through this attention cycle several times.
A key reason for the media’s relative lack of interest in climate change has to do with the nature of news itself. News likes things that are new – that have just happened or just been discovered. It likes events that happen close by. It likes dramatic events involving people, and if those people are well-known, it likes that even better.
News likes unambiguous, discrete events, straight-forward, one-off happenings rather than long-term social trends. And the media also like negative news. Conflict and tragedy always make for good copy.
Climate change struggles to meet many of these news values. Yes, climate change is generally bad news: more violent storms, flooding, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, destruction of ecosystems and dangerous temperature increases.
But for many readers, it is happening far away from them, to people with whom they do not identify. It is also not new. In fact, as some of the journalists I have interviewed for my research point out, it is essentially the same story over and over again.
Nor is climate change a discrete or straight-forward story. It is happening in many different arenas – oceanography, climatology, geophysics, atmospheric science – and is taking place gradually over a long period. The responses it calls forth are also dispersed over many different policy fields.
News organisations also need something to report: a new scientific paper, new data on climate change impacts, or even something as simple as someone saying something new about climate change. These “inputs” are often missing for long periods in the climate change discourse, essentially leaving journalists with nothing to write about.
So the very nature of climate change makes an inherently difficult subject for journalists and news organisations to cover. People generally equate levels of media coverage of a given issue with its importance, so low levels of climate change overage have consequences in society.
The Paris climate change conference at the end of this month will, if previous experience is anything to go by, see a spike in media coverage of climate change. This is because a conference such at COP21 does meet some of those news values discussed above.
It is a contained event and the media can therefore make better sense of it. Coverage is likely to focus on the politics of the conference – who is winning, who is losing – rather than substance of the debate or the outcomes.
However, the real challenge for the media will come after the delegates have left on December 12th. Will levels of media interest decline sharply like they did after the last major climate change conference in Copenhagen in 2009?
Or will we see a new paradigm in news coverage to address this global challenge, one which sees the environment as an unspoken frame for stories much in the way jobs or the economy are now?
Two Degrees 