Convinced that climate change is real, print media in China, India and Brazil give little room to sceptical voices
LONDON (AlertNet) – Climate sceptics have gained a significant foothold in right-leaning U.S. and U.K. print media but are virtually absent in news reports in key developing world nations such as China, India and Brazil, a new Oxford University study shows.
That’s in part because fossil-fuel lobby groups are weaker in many of those countries, and homegrown climate skeptics simply fewer. But it’s also because many developing countries have more first-hand experience with the impacts of climate change, suggests the report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
China’s government, for instance, has “a very clear position, that climate change is real,” said Rebecca Nadin, director of the British Council’s climate change and sustainability programme in China, and one of the authors of the report.
As a result, in a country where the government plays such a powerful rule, “climate change is not contentious, unlike other issues,” she said.
In Brazil, where hydropower provides 80 percent of electricity, the oil industry was until recently a state monopoly, and many leadinng newspapers have well-trained teams of science journalists, “climate skepticism is hardly present” in the media, the report said.
And in India, where an array of strong civil society groups are convinced by the science of climate change, the country’s media spend little time questioning climate science, focusing instead on how the need to address climate change might impact development, and who should pay the price, the report said.
That’s in stark contrast to the United States, where a powerful fossil fuel industry funds climate sceptic organizations, and a journalistic culture of seeking “balance” in stories drives reporters to seek opposing views, even if they are less well-founded in science.
That, combined with a failure to differentiate between sceptics who doubt the science of climate change and sceptics who simply disagree with the policy approaches to addressing it, means “most everything gets distilled down to a shouting match between those claiming a hoax and those claiming catastrophe,” noted Andy Revkin, a New York Times opinion writer and author on climate issues, who spoke via phone link at the report launch in London Thursday night.
In the U.K., by comparison, tabloid print media – who depend on controversy to attract readers – have been major outlets for climate sceptic views, the report found.
The political leanings of media also play a key role in whether sceptical voices are included in stories on climate change, noted the study.
A range of right-leaning UK newspapers, including the Sun, Express and Telegraph, and the Wall Street Journal in the United States, regularly featured “non-contested” climate skeptic voices in opinion and news features. The more left-leaning New York Times and UK-based Guardian newspapers, by comparison, never did, the study found.
The absence of right-leaning political parties and media in Brazil, India and France is one reason climate sceptics rarely appear in media reports, the study noted.
The study, of more than 3,000 printed news and opinion articles in the U.K., U.S., France, Brazil, China and India, focused on two time periods – the first around the launch of two key Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports on climate science in early 2007, and the second around the closely watched UN Copenhagen climate negotiations in 2009.
That second period also coincided with the so-called Climategate scandal, in which emails hacked from a computer at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit were released. Climate sceptics claimed the emails showed that scientists were manipulating climate data, a charge that was investigated and ultimately dismissed.
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