News•January 3, 2011
2010 in Review: The Year Climate Coverage 'Fell Off The Map'
By Douglas Fischer, DailyClimate.org
Media coverage of climate change in 2010 slipped to levels not seen since 2005, after spiking in late 2009 in the run-up to the much-hyped United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen and the release of private emails from climate scientists stored on a English university's server..
Analysis of DailyClimate.org's archive of global media coverage shows that journalists published some 23,156 climate-related stories in English last year — a 30 percent drop from '09'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 website's database, more than 11,000 reporters tackled the subject, a 22 percent drop for 2010.
Despite the trend, some outlets and reporters remain prolific. Reuters again led the pack, publishing 1,683 stories last year – almost 4.5 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.
Analysis of nightly news coverage of global warming from 1980 to 2010 on NBC, CBS, and ABC. Credit: Robert Brulle.
Drexel University professor Robert Brulle has analyzed nightly network news since the 1980s. Last year's climate coverage was so miniscule, he said, that's 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 percent in Toronto's Globe & Mail, 44 percent in the Wall Street Journal, 21 percent in the New York Times, 33 percent 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 e-mail release in late 2009.
A television crew conducts an interview at the UN Climate Talks in Cancun, Mexico in December, 2010. US media coverage of the Cancun negotiations was sparse in comparison to the previous year's climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark. Credit: UNFCCC/flickr.
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” 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 '09.
E&E News, publisher of ClimateWire and Greenwire, also saw increased coverage, as did ABC News in Australia and the Edinburgh Scotsman.
U.S. newspaper coverage of global warming. Credit: Max Boykoff, University of Colorado.
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 percent 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.
DailyClimate.org is a nonprofit news service covering climate change.
Web Resources:
Center for Science & Technology World data ; US data
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
Margot 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