Suddenly, television news warming up to climate change

‘This is the biggest story of our time’

LOS ANGELES, Sept 17, (RTRS): More than a decade ago, ABC News pulled off an amazing feat: a 2007 special edition of “20/20” that called attention to the rapid deterioration of the global environment. Reporters were stationed on all seven continents. The news unit even managed to have the lights turned off on the Empire State Building and Times Square to symbolize the dire threat posed by the decline of the earth’s natural support systems. Anchor Diane Sawyer had to use a flashlight – on camera – to maneuver around the set.

Bill Weir, then an ABC News correspondent who provided a report for the special from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, thought it marked the start of a real focus by TV-news outlets on the challenges of climate change. He was wrong.

“The recession and Obamacare came,” said Weir, who is now CNN’s chief climate correspondent. “We had the rug pulled out from under us, those of us who care about the topic.” Besides, he asks, “who wants to pop some corn and gather the kids around and watch a show about the end of the world?”

Several of the nation’s biggest TV outlets hope that in 2019, the answer is “More than there used to be.”

Suddenly, TV news outlets that have found climate-change coverage difficult to emphasize for prolonged periods are warming up to more ambitious reporting. NBC News has launched a new “climate unit” that will present reports throughout this week, says Janelle Rodriguez, the NBC News senior vice-president who will oversee it, and has plans to livestream a two-day forum on the topic from Georgetown University. CBS News has been running “Eye on Earth” reports throughout its programs. CNN gained recent notice for an hours-long series of “town hall” interviews with Democratic candidates on the topic.

Dismiss

It’s easy to dismiss these efforts as something geared toward getting ratings around the time the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is expected to release a dim report on the global climate in Monaco. But news executives and academics suggest the winds are shifting and that news aficionados can expect more stories about their environment to show up in their information diet.

“We are not just going to do a week on this and then won’t be talking about it again,” says Rashida Jones, senior vice-president of specials for NBC News and MSNBC. “This is the biggest story of our time.”

For years, it has not been. Walter Cronkite had concerns about the planet, says Al Ortiz, CBS News’ vice-president of standards and practices, and late in his career anchored several long CBS News reports on the topic. But news presentations on the subject have in the more recent past often focused on the politics around climate change, rather than the deteriorating environment itself. NBC News’ “Meet the Press” surprised critics and viewers in January when anchor Chuck Todd devoted an entire hour to the topic. He called climate change “a literally Earth-changing subject that doesn’t get talked about this thoroughly, on television news at least,” and then announced the show wasn’t going to treat the subject as if it were a matter for debate. “The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period. We’re not going to give time to climate deniers.”

While many other nations have pronounced the issue a threat, the US has gotten bogged down over whether citizens believe the issue is real. “TV news felt the need to be balanced, but balance isn’t the same thing as being accurate,” says Jeffrey Blevins, who heads the journalism department at the University of Cincinnati and has studied how the media covers divisive issues. As a result, the issue of climate change often “looks like a toss-up” in TV programming, he says, and the networks often cover it as a debate rather than a certainty. “Let’s face it,” says Blevins. “Politics is better television than science.” A funny thing has happened, however, on the way to the potential apocalypse. Climate change has moved from a topic of discussion to a phenomenon that turns up in people’s backyards. Intense hurricanes and tornadoes are swirling around the nation with greater frequency. Rainfall is often increasing, along with flooding. The weather is hard to dismiss, notes Al Roker, the weather anchor for NBC’s “Today” and a co-anchor of the show’s third hour. And news units have a raft of statistics about intensifying hurricane speeds and inches of rainfall to deploy.