Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press

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Abstract

This paper demonstrates that US prestige-press coverage of global warming from 1988 to 2002 has contributed to a significant divergence of popular discourse from scientific discourse. This failed discursive translation results from an accumulation of tactical media responses and practices guided by widely accepted journalistic norms. Through content analysis of US prestige press—meaning the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal—this paper focuses on the norm of balanced reporting, and shows that the prestige press's adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropogenic contributions to global warming and resultant action.

Introduction

On June 11, 2001, George W. Bush stated that, “the United States has spent $18 billion on climate research since 1990, three times as much as any other country, and more than Japan and all 15 nations of the EU combined” (New York Times, 2001, p. A12). During this time, top climate change scientists from around the globe—comprising the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—improved understanding of global warming, and produced three major reports and many related documents. With increasing confidence, the IPCC has asserted that global warming is a serious problem that has anthropogenic influences, and that it must be addressed immediately. In the managerial scientific discourse represented by the IPCC (Adger et al., 2001), a remarkably high level of scientific consensus has emerged on these two particular issues.1 D. James Baker, administrator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has said about global warming that “[t]here's a better scientific consensus on this than on any issue I know—except maybe Newton's second law of dynamics” (Warrick, 1997, p. A1).

However, on December 3, 2002, the Washington Post, citing “numerous uncertainties [that] remain about global warming's cause and effect”, top administration officials communicated George W. Bush's call “for a decade of research before the government commits to anything more than voluntary measures to stem carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions” (Pianin, 2002, p. A8). This statement was not only a backhanded swipe at the findings of scientists concerned about global warming, but it was also the spectacular culmination of a complex and perpetually unfolding discursive process propagated by the prestige press in the United States.

The continuous juggling act journalists engage in, often mitigates against meaningful, accurate, and urgent coverage of the issue of global warming. Since the general public garners most of its knowledge about science from the mass media (Nelkin, 1987; Wilson, 1995), investigating the mass media's portrayal of global warming is crucial. The disjuncture above is one illustration that—through the filter of balanced reporting—popular discourse has significantly diverged from the scientific discourse.2 To date, this disconnection3 has played a significant role in the lack of concerted international action to curb practices that contribute to global warming.4

This paper explores the notion that the US prestige press—by which we mean the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal—has contributed in significant ways to failed discursive translations regarding global warming. These press outlets have done this by adhering to the journalistic norm of balanced reporting, offering a countervailing “denial discourse”—”a voluble minority view [that] argues either that global warming is not scientifically provable or that it is not a serious issue”—roughly equal space to air its suppositions (Adger et al., 2001, p. 707). The ‘balancing’ of scientific findings and the counter-findings results, in large part, from an accumulation of tactical media responses and practices guided by widely accepted journalistic norms and values.

Section snippets

Global warming and journalistic norms

Much research has examined the mass media's ability to accurately or sufficiently report scientific findings regarding global warming, greenhouse gases, and climate change (Bell (1994a), Bell (1994b); Dunwoody and Peters, 1992; Nissani, 1999; Miller and Riechert, 2000). A number of studies have delved beneath this surface-level exploration to identify factors that lead to inaccurate or otherwise insufficient coverage (Wilson, 2000; Cottle, 2000; Trumbo, 1996). “Science,” as Ungar (2000, p. 308)

A word about Bias

When we employ the term ‘bias’ we are not referring to ideological bias. Whether the prestige press has a liberal or conservative bias may be inherently irresolvable. We agree with media scholar W. Lance Bennett (2002, p. 44) when he writes:

Some variations in news content or political emphasis may occur, but they can seldom be explained as the result of journalists routinely injecting their partisan views into the news. To the contrary, the avoidance of political partisanship by journalists is

Methodology

This study investigates the US prestige-press coverage of global warming between 1988 and 2002 through quantitative methods. This approach illuminates the differences between the discourse in the US prestige press and generally agreed-upon scientific discourse, while mapping out patterns of US prestige-press coverage of global warming over time. The project takes empirical steps to unpack the journalistic norm of balance, excavating this norm to see if its application is problematic when

Balance as bias: anthropogenic global warming coverage

We first examined how the idea of anthropogenic global warming was covered in the US prestige press (Fig. 1). As previously noted, there is much agreement in the managerial scientific community that human actions are contributing to global warming. But was this consensus reflected in news coverage? Or, is the journalistic norm of balanced reporting—telling ‘both’ sides of the story—a mediating variable that skewed and distorted global warming coverage? In other words, was coverage of global

Conclusion

To address the structural roots of energy and transportation policy through calls for mandatory action to combat global warming is to threaten many well-heeled, carbon-based interests (Houghton, 1997; Leggett, 2001). George W. Bush's campaign promises in 2000 not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, saying, “it would unfairly burden the United States,” illustrates the oft employed logic of United States government regarding environmental issues, but it also plays into the hands of oil conglomerates

Acknowledgements

An earlier draft of this project was presented at the 2002 Berlin Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, 6–7 December in Berlin, Germany. The authors would like to thank M. Kaia Sand, Roberto Sanchez-Rodriguez, Dana Takagi, Mike Goodman, Ross Gelbspan, S. Ravi Rajan, Rose Cohen, Dustin Mulvaney, Ignacio Fernandez, Eunice Blavascunas, Alexander Gershenson, Jessica Roy, Sarita Gaytan, David Goodman, and Thomas Boykoff for their assistance at various stages of this

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