On Monday, Media Matters published an analysis of how well broadcast news covered the climate change connection to Hurricane Florence. Big surprise: by and large, they didn’t.
According to Media Matters, ABC didn’t mention climate change at all in their coverage, while CBS, PBS, CNN and MSNBC provided even less climate-related coverage than they did for Hurricane Harvey last year. NBC was the only outlet to improve, airing a single segment about Florence and climate change. This is an improvement of 100% from last year’s Harvey coverage, which had zero segments on climate change.
PBS and CBS both aired two pieces that mentioned the climate connection, compared to each airing three for Harvey. CNN aired five climate-hurricane segments during Harvey, but this year climate only got two off-hand mentions, while MSNBC aired four segments, one less than during Harvey.
Fox, ever the leader in quality news programming, aired more climate segments than anyone else. Unfortunately, all six of their segments were dismissive of the established science, with two featuring deniers Roy Spencer and Joe Bastardi. There were also an impressive four separate examples of Fox hosts defending President Trump from the Washington Post editorial that argued Trump’s denial and anti-climate agenda made him complicit in the storm’s damage.
With 24 hours a day to fill, one would think that cable news would be more than happy to jump into the science of climate change and hurricanes. Think of all the pretty graphs and visualizations they could show! While discussing the science might be sort of dry, using B-roll footage of past flooding linked to climate change would be exactly the sort of dramatic footage broadcast news finds irresistible. Networks could even do a debate between real, legitimate scientists about how much worse climate change made the hurricane, if at all, delivering exactly the sort of adversarial drama audiences love! Heck, even a lopsided “debate” between a panel of real scientists against a lone denier could be interesting and informative.
Why isn’t there more, then? Well, Chris Hayes mentioned over the summer that climate change is a ratings killer. This got some considerable blowback from print journalists, whose click counting provided evidence of climate content appeal. The conspiratorially-minded among us might look at the advertisers on TV news and point out just how many fossil fuel ads there are, along with ads for cars, meats and other causes of climate change, and deduce that broadcasters are worried about losing sponsors. But that’d require the sort of conspiracy among a wide group of diverse actors that most, outside of Fox News, agree there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of.
There’s no obvious explanation, then, for broadcast media’s consistent failure to tell the climate story. Apparently, explaining science is just too hard for the talking heads on TV news, or not exciting and newsy-enough, even when there was a new ground-breaking pre-event attribution analysis linking climate change to the storm.
Unfortunately, it appears the revolution in extreme weather and climate change attribution science will not be televised.
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