This week’s case study surrounds climate change. Featuring an extremely relevant story, this post will highlight some of the problems with the way it is being reported. Arguably, digital technology may be drawing people away from the real issues and engulfing them into a world of ‘mind numbing’ content. Therefore, traditional media platforms may need to make more of a conscious effort to highlight the global emergency that is at stake. However, digital communication has its benefits and could be utilised to enforce the urgency of the crisis.
Climate Change Journalism
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), in the past ten years at least 13 journalists have been killed after attempting to work on environment-related stories. Therefore, reporting the climate crisis is arguably one of the more challenging stories to report upon from a journalism perspective, due to this fear. A sense of moral panic also surrounds the subject from the public eye. Therefore, from a citizen’s point of view journalists now have to make the story more engaging to encourage habit changing.
Recent Examples of Journalism Surrounding Climate Change
Climate-change journalism has a tendency to overlook some of the key issues. If you were to do a Google Image search for ‘effects of climate change’ and quickly scan the results, what is seen is very stereotypical. An example can be seen below:
It can be argued that animal extinction remains a focal point in climate change reporting. The BBC published an article that explains how a lonely polar bear made its way into Russia, saying, “climate change has been damaging polar bears’ habitats.” Although other animals should be taken into consideration as they share the same planet as humans, this almost makes the reader feel more worried for the polar bear than the human race; a balance needs to be established.
A website called Climate Visuals aims to tackle this issue by showing the effects of climate change on the human race. The first image you see when you visit the website is of a human, which is arguably quite refreshing. The focus of this site on the impact of the crisis on humans is refreshing as it shows the effects on humans as well as animals, thus incorporating the idea of having a balance.
Climate Change Journalism is Attempting to Adapt
There is a lot of fear surrounding the idea that journalism isn’t highlighting the urgency of the crisis. Columbia Journalism Review claims that journalists often fit new stories into pre-existing narratives and that the crisis needs a lot more attention than this. The Guardian issued a memo saying that they are planning to change their language when describing the environment. They will now use terms such as ‘climate crisis’ and ‘global heating.’ They feel that these terms are more accurate as they want to be “scientifically precise.” Changing their narratives may help to highlight the urgency of the climate crisis. The Guardian also claim they will change the images they use to more strongly personify the impact of the crisis on humans. This provides a solution for the issue mentioned previously.
However, to focus entirely on the negatives may be less encouraging for audiences and influence them to do less as they may feel like the efforts they make are not having an effect. A tweet by Amanda Loviza says how without danger or chaos, people’s attention is cannot be captured. However, this must be balanced with positive headlines; she complements the chaos in the image with the headline “how to avoid climate breakdown”, giving a sense of hope.
Appealing to the Right Audience
The climate crisis is affecting all audiences. Therefore, it is only logical to predict that all audiences need to be targeted evenly. According to Rice et al. (2016), “utilising digital media and web-based platforms enables users to actively share information.” Moreover, online videos, social media sites and other forms of digital communication need to be utilised just as much as traditional forms of journalism need to be in order to strike a balance with who is being targeted.
To Conclude…
Climate change is an urgent crisis that demands successful journalism across all media platforms, with evidence suggesting that the way in which the crisis is reported needs adapting. Animals have been the focal point of many news stories in the past, however human’s are also widely affected by the crisis, meaning that there should be a balance in the quantity of reports on each matter. Additionally, just because the world is becoming digitally dominant, traditional platforms cannot be discarded entirely as the crisis affects everybody and therefore everybody should have equal access to its journalistic content.
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Further Reading:
Rice, E., Haynes, E., Royce, P. and Thompson, S., 2016. Social media and digital technology use among Indigenous young people in Australia: a literature review. International Journal for Equity in Health [online], 15 (81), 1-16.
