Media produce more heat than light, prof says

By Clay Evans

Consider a few examples of the language used in the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in September:

“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. … In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1,400 years. … The rate of sea level rise since the mid-19th century has been larger than the mean rate during the previous two millennia (high confidence).”

Meanwhile, there are polling data about Americans’ attitudes toward climate change: According to a March Gallup poll, only 62 percent of Americans believe there is a scientific consensus on global warming. And according to a Pew Center for Research poll also taken in March, just 69 percent of Americans say there is solid evidence that average global temperature has been rising in recent decades.

While climate scientists can take heart in the fact that skepticism has been declining since 2010, there is still a wide chasm between what qualified scientists say and millions of Americans believe.

And that is, in part, due to the way the media cover the subject, says Max Boykoff, assistant professor at CU-Boulder’s Center for Science and Technology Policy, part of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

In “Public Enemy No. 1?: Understanding Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change,” published this spring in the journal American Behavioral Scientist, Boykoff examines how “outlier” views of climate skeptics are given disproportionate weight in the media, despite the overwhelming consensus supporting anthropogenic climate change. Thanks to everything from long-standing journalistic norms concerning “balance” and an attraction to “conflict,” to political and economic self-interest, minority skeptical voices have come to be seen as valid by millions of Americans.

“There are amplified outlier voices out there that are garnering a great deal of attention and sucking the oxygen out of productive discussions,” says Boykoff, who is also the author of the book “Who Speaks for Climate? Making Sense of Media Reporting on Climate Change.”

“In other words, it’s a lot easier to muddy the waters than it is to clean them up.”

Boykoff is widely seen as one of the nation’s experts in media treatment of climate change.

“Max Boykoff has become the leading analyst of media treatment of human-induced climate change. In his new article he demonstrates how the ‘outlier voices’ — those of climate-change skeptics, contrarians and deniers — have been given disproportionate attention in the mass media and thereby come to have undue influence on policy issues,” says Riley Dunlap, professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University. “In this process, he rebuts the frequent allegation that these voices are muzzled by the mainstream media.”

In a related and upcoming paper with co-author Shawn Olson, Boykoff also examines the role of what he calls “celebrity” contrarians in muddying the message for media. He notes that climate contrarians — those who “vocally challenge what they see as a false consensus of mainstream climate science through critical attacks on climate science and eminent climate scientists, often with substantial support from fossil fuels industry organizations and conservative think tanks” — have done a remarkable job of confusing matters in the minds of many people.

Take the case of Pat Michaels of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who is paid to spend 40 percent of his time reaching out to the media.

“That is stunning, compared to time that others influencing climate science and policy discussions spend” Boykoff says.

Boykoff examined prominent media sources, including TV transcripts and newspaper articles, over time to see how they portrayed climate change to look for patterns. He followed up with qualitative interviews of key actors in the debate.

“Where prominent actors are being quoted, (people) are drawn into stories much more than others,” he says.

But to the extent that citizens allow themselves to be sucked into antagonist-protagonist narratives about climate change, it may become harder to make inroads on education and policy decisions about climate change.

“We’ve found that while it can be appealing at times for folks to demonize climate contrarians, it’s also counterproductive. It makes it much harder to look at larger issues over time,” Boykoff says.

Meanwhile, journalists following accepted norms of the profession — looking for exciting, novel stories featuring dramatic personalities — can impede the public’s understanding of the science. They can, and should, do better.

“We definitely disagree with the notion of censorship,” Boykoff says, “but we want them to put stories into context, to write about how these are outlier perspectives. Call it truth in labeling.”

 December 2013