Universal messaging about the importance of looking out for the environment, for everyone’s benefit, was strong a few decades ago. (Who still picks up plastic six-pack rings and rips them apart to help save the turtles?)
But what role can, and should, journalists be playing when it comes to communication about climate change, and how can the damage caused by deniers be repaired?
“I’ve been long interested in the power dynamics of our communication environment and how journalism fits in,” says Adrienne Russell, the Mary Laird Woods professor and co-director of the Center for Journalism, Media and Democracy in the Department of Communications at the University of Washington. She’s also just published a new book, “The Mediated Climate: How Journalists, Big Tech and Activists are Vying for Our Future,” examining what newsrooms have done to improve coverage of climate change while suggesting what’s still missing.
“When we’re talking about journalism and the media, it’s so broad that to make generalizations doesn’t work,” Russell says. “I’m not talking about Fox News, I’m talking about the people dedicated to producing high-quality climate reporting. Those people are collaborating with one another. There’s much less competition between outlets or among journalists and much more collaboration — they’re collaborating with scientists, they’re changing the way they’re covering activism.”
This is in part because the time to wonder what climate change might look like is over.
“You’d be hard pressed to find anyone not impacted by the climate crisis now. For a long time, it was something (that) if you lived off the land or in certain parts of the world, it was something you were already feeling. It was reported in the United States as something coming in the future. The future is definitely here,” Russell says, adding that Washington state, like Oregon and California, now has a fire season.
As a result, the question, and the approach to journalism about the climate, needs to change.
“We know (climate change) is happening, we know why, we know what’s going to happen, more or less, based on models that various sorts of climate scientists have created for the future. We don’t know what we’re collectively going to decide to do about it,” Russell says. “That’s where we need to be communicating with one another. This is why we need not just information from journalists and scientists and communities that are experiencing these things firsthand, but we need to understand: what are the values and ethics we share that we can apply to deciding how to do this? What are we going to change? What are we going to give up? What are we going to get when we give that up?”
This is a “complicated set of decisions” that need to be made, but it will only be effective if there’s a shared discussion in a “robust and healthy public sphere,” she says.
In the past, when media was one thing and not a never-ending supply of information from social media, TV, the internet, radio and print, there was a general belief or hope that the best information would work its way to the top and out to the masses, helping people everyone learn what they needed to make good choices.
“Our current information environment is built to the contrary, to benefit and make the most prominent sensationalist information, emotion-fanning communication,” Russell says. “It’s a dynamic that’s kind of gamed against good journalism, whereby journalists are doing this great work and it’s entering into a communication environment that’s fundamentally polluted, so it doesn’t really get the air it needs to connect with the people it needs to connect with.”
