Confused about climate change? You’re not alone.
According to a report released this week by The Climate Institute, 66% of your fellow Australians think there are too many conflicting opinions for the public to be sure about the claims being made about climate change.
Why is this so? Are governments not doing enough? Are NGOs and think tanks not pumping out enough information? Are scientists just really crap communicators? Have the sceptics worked the smokers’ playbook to perfection? Are we just not interested anymore?
I found one of the tables from The Climate Institute’s survey to be most revealing. When 1,131 Australians were asked how they perceived the performance of key sectors in addressing climate change, guess who came off with the worst rating? After two solid years of Mr Abbott’s “toxic tax” attack, you’d think the federal government would cop most of the blame from voters. But it didn’t.
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The standout worst performing sector, as recognised by its purportedly valued customers, was the media. NGOs top the list with a net +33 rating for their performance.
Local community and local government fare pretty well. Everyone else is in the negative. Voters recognise that Australian business and industry have been dragged kicking and screaming into action, failing to meet the aspirations of the public with a net -21 rating.
But at the bottom of the pile, nowhere near in sync with community expectations, is the media on -22 net rating when it comes to doing its bit on climate change.
“Surely Australians don’t think the media has a responsibility for taking action on climate change”, I hear the Bolt, Albrechtsen, Akerman troika ruminate. Again they’d be way out of step with community sentiment given 82% of respondents to The Climate Institute’s report said the media should be taking a leading role or contributing towards action on climate change, compared to 89% for the federal government.
The media survey their audiences to distraction and reckon they know what a reader and viewer wants to read, watch or hear. But with plummeting circulations, sometimes I wonder if their researchers are asking the right questions. There has been lots of media talk about aspirational voters, but do journalists really understand the aspirations of their voters?
In 2013, The Climate Institute will run another benchmarked Climate of The Nation report. Let’s see who are the improvers then.
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Murdoch saw climate denial as a personal issue. If you fly around the world on a daily basis, and cut-down trees for a living, you either have to be a complete denialist, or face your kids and grand-children on a weekly basis and admit that you are stuffing their world. It is a psychological impossibility to be a worldwide press baron and be 100% green!
Then beyond the personal political view, Murdoch found denial was a great ‘point of differentiation’ for Faux News in the US, and his newspapers everywhere. It may not have appealed to everyone, but it solidified a certain base who did not want their lifestyle challenged – at a time when mainstream media needed to identify and retain a base.
And as we know from the Sorenson Enquiry and the documentary ‘Outfoxed’, the reporters within Newscorp all knew how to read the ‘daily talking points’ from HO, to write material that fully complied with the boss’s ideology.
The idea of giving ‘both sides’ equal coverage has played into the hands of the few denialist ‘scientists’. That pre-Murdoch press concept has given such spokespeople a far-greater voice than their numbers or standing deserved. More recently, the media use of terms like “… about which the vast majority of scientists are agreed” is now confirming that the denialists are not to be seen as an equal force, but a greatly reduced number.
The media needs to get over “is it real?” articles, and just cover “action plans” at every level.
But the very best contribution by the media was the recent cartoon (cited in an SMH forum) “What if climate change isn’t real and we are making the world a better place for nothing?”
Graeme Harrison
prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu
Author of paper on new global warming tipping point:
http://www.warming.weebly.com
“Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
looks like it worked. congratulations everyone.
“82% of respondents to The Climate Institute’s report said the media should be taking a leading role or contributing towards action on climate change”
sounds like a quote from the questionnaire. A leading question. Several of these surveys I’ve looked at are comically biased, little better than push-polling.
Let’s see independent surveys.
Why the surprise. Commercial interests own the bulk of the media and push their own agenda whilst the likes of the ABC (where John Howard has previously stacked the board) are bullied by the Coal ition into parroting commercial media fluff, lest they be accused of bias (again) and totally neutered after the next election.
This is the outcome of the ‘My noisy opinion has equal standing as your facts’ approach to ‘balance’.
This approach gives both credibility and a platform to some of the silliest arguments. The convoy of no consequence was a great case in point.
We had individuals in the media stoking fires about new elections(their last attempt at stoking resulted in a riot) – outside any criteria for doing so. This fact was never presented, but a great deal of bloviating was.
The media generally needs to focus less on just information volume but more of information quality.