POLITICAL PLAYBOOK BASED SCIENCE JOURNALISM
The Nation
The Media Are Complacent While the World Burns
But there’s a brand-new playbook for journalists fighting for a 1.5°C world.
By Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope
APRIL 22, 2019
This article is being jointly published with The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review’s partner in a April 30 conference aimed at reframing the way journalists cover climate change.
... the US news media need to remember their Paul Revere responsibilities—to awaken, inform, and rouse the people to action. To that end, The Nation and CJR are launching “Covering Climate Change: A New Playbook for a 1.5-Degree World,” a project aimed at dramatically improving US media coverage of the climate crisis. When the IPCC scientists issued their 12-year warning, they said that limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius would require radically transforming energy, agriculture, transportation, construction, and other core sectors of the global economy. Our project is grounded in the conviction that the news sector must be transformed just as radically... There is a runaway train racing toward us, and its name is climate change.
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Climate crisis … meet journalism crisis
So it’s into this double-edged conundrum that enters the proverbial knight in shining armor. It comes in the form of a new consortium of journalism interests with the specific purpose of vastly improving media coverage of the climate crisis...With a $1 million grant from the Schumann Foundation and its veteran journalist and author [AND WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY] Bill Moyers, the new initiative met at Columbia in late April amid an admiring crowd of like-minded media representatives and concerned climate activists.
... the session featured speakers and panelists who presented a number of salient observations about the nuts and bolts – and also about the heart and conscience and the blood and guts – of journalism in this current era, some no doubt more realistic than others:
- Author and activist Bill McKibben: “It’s not the job of journalists to see that people get upset, but the news is upsetting.”
- Book author, opinion columnist, and self-identified provocateur and activist Naomi Klein: “It is impossible to be apathetic about the end of the world.” ...
- Book author and journalist Hertsgaard discussed plans for “a journalist’s playbook for a 1.5 C [degree] world”
- Author and TV veteran Bill Moyers... bearer of the $1 million Schumann check: quoted David Attenborough as expressing climate concerns and resulting prospects for “the collapse of civilization and the extinction of much of the natural world.”
