Who determines the set of ideas the public is exposed to -- and how they are framed? The national media.
The media's choices are especially important in a decade when the Executive Branch -- the principal force for setting the national agenda -- was run by two oil men who actively devoted major resources to denying the reality of climate science, ignoring the impacts, and muzzling U.S. climate scientists.
Yet the national media remains exceedingly lame on the climate issue, as a searing critique by a leading U.S. journalist details (see "How the press bungles its coverage of climate economics"). The media downplay the threat of global warming (and hence the cost of inaction). And they still hedge on attributing climate impacts to human action.
This criticism extends to our premier reporters, such as the New York Times' Andy Revkin. Indeed, I (and dozens of other people) have an email from last week that Andy sent to Mark Morano (denier extraordinaire staffer for Senate denier extraordinaire James Inhofe). Andy asserts:
I've been the most prominent communicator out there saying the most established aspects of the issue of human-driven climate change lie between the poles of catastrophe and hoax.
Following that shockingly un-scientific statement, he includes the link to his 2007 piece, "A New Middle Stance Emerges in Debate over Climate," that touts the views of Roger A. Pielke Jr., of all people! The "middle stance" is apparently just the old denier do-nothing stance with a smile, a token nod to science, and a $5 a ton CO2 tax -- which is why I call them denier-eq's.
Now if the top NYT reporter is pushing the mushy middle -- if he writes things like "Even with the increasing summer retreats of sea ice, which many polar scientists say probably are being driven in part by global warming caused by humans, if his stories have online headlines like Arctic Ice Hints at Warming, Specialists Say -- why on Earth would it be news that the public is itself stuck in the mushy middle?
And yet in both the NYT article and his blog, Revkin makes a huge deal of a poll that, if anything, merely reveals how bad the media's coverage of the issue is. His blog post, "Obama Urgent on Warming, Public Cool" and his article, "Environmental Issues Slide in Poll of Public's Concerns," completely misframe the issue. Let's start with the blog:
