Covering Climate Change: "Energy, energy, energy -- that's the story."

by Emily Gertz

Published February 10, 2009 @ 08:42PM PT

I just got back from a rare opportunity to listen and ask questions of leading journalists on the present and future of covering covering climate change.  It was held at the American Museum of Natural History -- which seems to be impervious to wireless signals of any kind. So here's some liveblogging-like moments from the conversation, transcribed from notes I took (old school style) by scribbling into my Moleskine:

Bud Ward, Yale Forum on Climate Change & Media, moderator: Let's assume that early on, journalists did not do a great job of covering climate change science. What did we learn? And if in the present we're moving from covering the science to covering the policy, what can we bring to that beat from what we learned covering the science?

Bill Blakemore, ABC News: A reporter's job in covering climate change is telling the patient what the patient needs to know. But the challenges include reporting the worst case scenarios, when needed, without paralyzing the public, and pulling the "Earth crisis" story out of the magazine feature type coverage, and into the hard news.

Andrew Revkin, The New York Times: The challenge for the media now is to step back and not be seduced by the story of the moment. It's not, 'Is Obama going to get a climate bill through,' but 'Is the atmosphere going to notice if he does?'

Climate issues are symptoms of our energy choices. The story of our time is that we've gone from one to six billion in the past 50 years, and we're going to nine billion by 2050 -- in a way that is beyond the capacity of our current ways of doing things. Energy, energy, energy: that's the story.

Diane Hawkins-Cox, CNN: The media has been bashed for trying to achieve "balance." Part of the problem was that the science was not absolute [about a decade ago], so it was incumbent upon journalists to bring other viewpoints to the story. But over the years journalists caught on to [the spin machine] and found ways to tell a fair story without going for the 50-50 balance.

Matthew Nisbet, American University School of Communications: Journalists typically focus on the science of the climate catastrophe, or the public accountability story. Even Barack Obama, when he talks about restoring science to its rightful place, may be alerting the public to the Democratic-Republican divide on the issue of climate change.

Alternative angles: Public health dimensions (shift away from polar bears to urban and suburban settings); Economic angles (being careful to avoid hype, i.e. "green jobs will save the economy"); Moral or ethical imperatives -- collective issues, collective responses, from both secular and religious communities.