2010 in review: The year climate coverage by the mainstream media 'fell off the map"

2010 in review: The year climate coverage 'fell off the map.'

Journalists at a press conference during the United Nations climate talks in Cancun in December. The number of media stories on climate change were down considerably in 2010. Photo courtesy United Nations/flickr

After spiking upward in response to Copenhagen talks and the 'climategate' uproar, media coverage of climate change plummeted to levels last seen in 2005, according to DailyClimate.org's archives and other media databases

by Douglas Fischer, Daily Climate editor, January 3, 2011

[Readers, we should all be appalled at these numbers.]


Media coverage of climate change in 2010 slipped to levels not seen since 2005, after spiking in in late 2009 in the run-up to the much-hyped United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen and the release [what release? the computer was hacked and they were stolen] of private emails from climate scientists stored on a English university server..

Analysis of DailyClimate.org's archive of global media coverage shows that journalists published 23,156 climate-related stories in English last year – a 30% drop from 2009's tally.

Those stories came from 8,710 different reporters, columnists and editorial writers at 1,552 different media outlets. Last year, according to the Web site's database, more than 11,000 reporters tackled the subject – a 22% drop for 2010.

Despite the trend, some outlets and reporters remain prolific. Reuters again lead the pack, publishing 1,683 stories last year – 4.6 stories a day. The New York Times had 1,116; the London Guardian, 941; the Associated Press, 793.

But for network news and other mainstream outlets, the trend was down, down, down.

Drexel University professor Robert Brulle has analyzed nightly network news since the 1980s. Last year's climate coverage was so miniscule, he said, that he's doubting his data.

"I can't believe it's this little. In the U.S., it's just gone off the map," he said. "It's pretty clear we're back to 2004, 2005 levels."

Coverage of December's United Nations climate talks in Cancun is Exhibit A: Total meeting coverage  by the networks consisted of one 10-second clip, Brulle said. By contrast, 2009's Copenhagen talks generated 32 stories, totaling 98 minutes of airtime. "I'm trying to check it again and again," Brulle said of the 2010 data. "It's so little, it's stunning."

Overall, based on preliminary data, the networks aired 32 stories on climate change last year, compared to 84 in 2009 and 144 in 2007, when former Vice President Al Gore released his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a key assessment on climate change. The two shared the Nobel Peace Prize that year.

"The cycle of media interest in climate change has run its course, and this story is no longer considered newsworthy," Brulle said.

The Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, which has tracked media coverage of climate change since 2000, finds a similar slide in five major U.S. newspapers.

After spiking to more than 450 articles in December 2009 – almost equal to the 2007 peak – coverage dropped precipitously in early 2010, falling to levels last seen in late 2005.

DailyClimate.org's archives extend reliably only to 2007. Year-to-year comparison shows a steep decrease in 2010 climate coverage for many of the world's major media outlets – off 51% in Toronto's Globe & Mail, 44% in the Wall Street Journal, 21% in the New York Times, 33% in the London Guardian, based on DailyClimate.org's database.

That, perhaps, is not unexpected given the hype leading up to the Copenhagen talks and the frenzy created by the [stolen] e-mail release in late 2009.

The Copenhagen meeting drew heads of state from nearly 200 nations, including President Barack Obama, Chinese Premier Wen Jiaobao, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Indian President Manmohan Singh. It ended in chaos, with the body able only to "take note" of a slim agreement that climate change is a problem and that deep cuts in global warming are necessary.

The so-called "climategate" scandal proved similarly flashy: hundreds of e-mails, pilfered from a server at the University of East Anglia, from climate scientists supposedly discussing "tricks" [actually one so-called "trick" was discussed -- which everyone knew about and used because it had been out there for about 10 years] to make their data fit and casting dispersions on critics. Yet half a dozen investigations by various governments and universities failed to find evidence of serious wrong-doing or tainted science.

But while the climate story may have fallen from the mainstream media's headlines over the course of 2009, a handful of outlets paid increased attention to the issue in 2010. 

New York-based Bloomberg News was a notable exception, one of the only major outlets to churn out more climate stories in 2010, jumping to 332 pieces last year versus 270 in 2009. 

E&E News, publisher of ClimateWire and GreenWire, also saw increased coverage, as did ABC News in Australia and the Edinburgh Scotsman.

And there remain a cadre of dedicated reporters churning out stories: DailyClimate's archives show 66 reporters wrote more than 30 stories apiece over the course of the year.

Of course, byline counts are an imprecise – and flawed – way to measure a journalist's productivity. A ground-breaking investigation often requires weeks or even months of research and reporting. 

But those 66 reporters accounted for 3450 stories last year – 15% of the total. Andy Revkin, the former New York Times reporter who now runs the paper's DotEarth blog, lead the list with 145 posts and stories. Politico's Darren Samuelson was second with 129 articles, followed by the Daily Telegraph's Louise Gray with 119 and Reuter's Alister Doyle with 108.

Below is a list of the most prolific 50, with affiliation and number of stories in Daily Climate's archives.

Daily Climate aggregates mainstream news from around the world seven days a week. A team of about 40 researchers and editors working for the Web site's publisher, Environmental Health Sciences, searches the Web evening and morning using specific criteria. The aim is not to capture every story on the topic, but a broad sample.

Reporter	Affiliation	2010 stories
Andrew Revkin	New York Times	146
Darren Samuelsohn	Politico	130
Louise Gray	London Daily Telegraph	119
Alister Doyle	Reuters	108
Robin Bravender	Politico	85
Suzanne Goldenberg	London Guardian	81
Matthew L. Wald	New York Times	81
Todd Woody	New York Times	81
Mike De Souza	Postmedia News	77
Timothy Gardner	Reuters	74
John M. Broder	New York Times	74
Richard Black	BBC	71
John Vidal	London Guardian	71
David Biello	Scientific American	69
Margo Roosevelt	Los Angeles Times	68
John Collins Rudolf	New York Times	68
Fiona Harvey	Financial Times	65
James Murray	Business Green	65
Fred Pearce	Freelance	64
Jenny Fyall	Scotsman	62
Bryan Walsh	Time	59
Richard Cowan	Reuters	55
Jeremy Hance	Mongabay.com	55
Juliet Eilperin	Washington Post	51
Adianto P. Simamora	Jakarta Post	51
Tom Arup	Sydney Morning Herald	50
Adam Morton	Sydney Morning Herald	50
Nina Chestney	Reuters	48
Ben Webster	London Times	47
Tiffany Hsu	Los Angeles Times	46
Michael D. Lemonick	ClimateCentral.org	46
Pete Harrison	Reuters	45
Ariel Schwartz	Fast Company	44
James Kanter	New York Times	44
Evan Lehmann	E&E News	43
Rick Daysog	Sacramento Bee	43
David Fogarty	Reuters	42
Ben Cubby	Sydney Morning Herald	41
David Adam	London Guardian	40
Juliette Jowit	London Guardian	40
Jeff Young	Living On Earth	39
Lenore Taylor	Sydney Morning Herald	38
Kate Sheppard	Mother Jones	38
Thomas Content	Milwaukee Journal Sentinel	36
Eli Kintisch	Science	36
Peter Behr	E&E News	35
Tyler Hamilton	Toronto Star	35
Terry Macalister	London Guardian	35
Jim Tankersley	Chicago Tribune	34
Lisa Friedman	E&E News	34
Anne C. Mulkern	E&E News	34

 Link:  http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2011/01/climate-coverage