Climate: Media's Balance Tips To Bias
Two researchers argue, in a paper published this month in the journal Global Environmental Change, that following the norms of American journalism, U.S. media have promulgated a bias in the coverage of climate change essentially by giving too much credence to climate skeptics at the expense of the scientific consensus.
I don’t know where the quotation marks went in this online copy of the article. I wasn’t able to find a linkable copy of the text of this article online, but I hope I can introduce build a unit on this case, the next time I teach journalism.
Reporters do like a controversy, which means they are naturally going to seek out and report on any disagreement within the scientific community. Since I’ve given some blogspace to environmental skeptics and to articles about one-sided media reporting in the past, it’s only fair that I present this article too.
I didn’t even blog the reports that the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence project had encountered a signal from aliens, since the article that started the speculation spent far more time investigating the possibility that the signal was a hoax or a phantom created by an object near the radio antenna that detected it. It would be an exaggeration to title that story with a headline such as “Researchers may have found alien signals.”
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First, I think the need for journalists to entertain (ultimately to get ad revenue) is the overwhelming problem...
Journalists are in the difficult position of (probably) not really understanding what scientific consensus is while they write for a public that certainly doesn't understand what it is either.
What I'd like to see is journalists that know enough to ask "How strong is the evidence for theory X vs theory Y?" and then report what the consensus is, how strong the theories X and Y are, and why there is disagreement (in terms of strength of evidence and explanatory power). Finally, the journalist must be respectful of other opinions while not confusing such opinions with scientific evidence or theories.
It may also be a failure of the scientists, who have some obligation to communicate to the public.
Even a journalist who specializes in scientific reporting may write on medical implants for one article, the ecology of a local riverbed the next article, and astrophysics the one after that. It's impossible for every journalist to have the scientific expertise to make independent judgments, so naturally the journalist is going to phone up an expert and fish for some good explanatory quotations of why scientist A and scientist B disagree.
Ron, you do make a good point, that it's worth noting when an opinion being quoted is far out of the mainstream.
It's hard to think of a science-related issue that isn't reported with the same bias. Hard to think of how it could be any other way when journalists need to entertain and they almost always present current scientific consensus as just another viewpoint.