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Business & Education News - September 15, 2004
Balance or bias: Covering climate change
By following the time-honored journalistic formula for balanced reporting, reporters
and editors at four top U.S. newspapers misrepresented the scientific community’s
understanding of human contributions to global warming, according to an analysis
recently published in the journal Global Environmental Change (2004,
14, 125–136). “The continuous juggling act journalists engage
in often mitigates against meaningful, accurate, and urgent coverage of the issue
of global warming,” write the researchers. From 1988 to 2002, a total of
3543 articles on climate change appeared in the Los Angeles Times (25%),
The New York Times (41%), The Wall Street Journal (5%), and The
Washington Post (29%). The researchers analyzed 636 articles randomly selected
from this pool. They discovered that 52.7% gave “roughly equal attention”
to generally accepted scientific evidence that human activity has contributed
to global warming and to skeptics’ arguments that climate change can be
explained purely as natural fluctuations. “By giving equal time to opposing
views, these newspapers significantly downplayed scientific understanding of the
role humans play in global warming,” says researcher Maxwell T. Boykoff.
He adds, “We respect [the journalists’ need] to represent multiple
viewpoints, but when generally agreed-upon scientific findings are presented side
by side with the viewpoints of a handful of skeptics, readers are poorly served.” |
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