My latest article on Impakter, just published:
Climate Reporting: Why People Won't Listen
Climate change and environmental issues still do not hit the news like the war in Ukraine or a billionaire’s trip to space but climate reporting is changing to meet the challenge
Not enough time is given to reporting on climate change compared to other news, and that’s a fact. Newsrooms around the world are currently in the grips of Ukraine war news, as they should be, yet climate change will not go away and still requires our attention: After all, it concerns our very existence on this planet.
As German media DW recently pointed out: On any given day of the average 38 stories on their home page, only one or two are about climate change. What is true for DW is true for any other major media outlet – and DW is no climate denier, far from it, it actively supports the fight against climate change, including through a special series of videos available on Youtube, the Planet A series focused on sustainability and climate change issues.
A couple of days ago, DW released its latest video in that series: It carries the provoking title “it’s hard to care about climate change”. To drive the point home, the video opens with an arresting calculation: When Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos went up in space last year, US news networks dedicated 212 minutes to the event in one day while climate change for the whole year occupied 267 minutes. In short, climate change’s coverage was about 350 times less than what Bezos got for his pleasure trip in space.
John Mecklin, the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists made that point forcefully in an interview last week with Covering Climate Now (CCN) “Yes, other issues are important, but if we don’t pay attention to the existential issues first, there won’t be a civilization for those other issues to play themselves out in.” (bold added)
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