Selling Global Warming

Network television and other media are using global warming to sell the news. I’ve been a television meteorologist for 29 years, and have been affiliated with CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS. Over nearly three decades of weather forecasting on television, I have seen many changes. The least of these changes have been in the atmosphere. By far the greatest changes have been in the television industry itself.

The major television networks, newspapers, magazines, and other media are not in the truth business – they are in the news business. This is not to say they are in the lying business however, what they consider to be news and truth is blurred due to the need to produce a profit in a “climate” of shrinking revenues. There’s an old maxim in the business: “If it bleeds it leads.” If a story has blood and drama it will be the first one on the news. Global warming stories are now bleeding all over the headlines.

What I’m saying is this: all those stories you’ve seen about drowning polar bears, bigger hurricanes, more droughts, increased wildfires, and melting polar caps may not be true.

News is by nature a compilation of dramatic, captivating, and often tragic events. Without these events, a newscast would be rather boring. Dramatic pictures of life and death events make news exciting and compelling. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has given news organizations plenty of new material. It has predicted that by 2100, global temperatures will rise 4 to 10 degrees. It’s only natural for network news managers to look at these forecasts as newsworthy. After all, we’re talking about melting ice caps that will first drown polar bears and then flood coastal cities. The I.P.C.C. says hurricanes will become more powerful and devastating. Droughts will spread across the globe. Hundreds and then thousands of animal and plant species will become extinct as temperatures climb. It’s a gripping story of global change that will rock nature and society. All of these events are bad news for humanity and the planet but good news for the news business. News organizations are in the bad news business.

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Why won’t the major television networks give a more balanced view of global warming? When your job is to generate a large audience, other priorities dominate. Television news is all about getting the largest audience. The networks love a good disaster story. If stories about a coming climate Armageddon will get more people to watch a news program, then that is what you’ll see. It is not in the interest of the networks or any other news media to deviate from the disastrous side of the global warming story. To do so would water down a neverending source of story ideas.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

The people who work at the networks are not scientists. The networks don’t look at global warming as a scientific issue but as a news story. Science looks for answers by experimentation and verification. In science, if the data disproves the theory, then the theory can’t be true. In the world of news there are no hard rules of objective verification of truth or falsehood. If the story is big and will make a ratings splash, then it becomes news. The networks see global warming not as something that needs balanced reporting but as an opportunity to generate audience. This is their job.

We must also consider the media’s own momentum.

I’ve seen this phenomenon over and over again through the years. If a story is popular and presents new angles that can be exploited each day, month, or year, it will continue to get airtime. After a while the story begins to take on a life of its own. It can be relied on to fill time during the news program and generate audience. For instance, back in the middle and late 1980s the AIDS story was breaking. Every local or national newscast had to have an AIDS story. This went on for years. Finally when it became apparent that AIDS was not going affect the vast majority of the population, the story all but disappeared from the news. After a time, if nothing new develops that can be used to generate audience, the story gets dumped. Producers simply leave it by the side of the road and move on there is never any retrospective on the issue. It is simply forgotten as if it never happened. Old news along with good news is no news. Another way a story can disappear from the headlines is if something else happens that is so big the old story is blasted off the air. Think of the Gary Condit story. Condit was a congressman who was implicated in the death of one of his interns, Chandra Levy. Every newscast had a Gary Condit story. Day after day, month after month, the networks and papers carried this story. Then September 11, 2001 came, and the Gary Condit story was gone. Literally overnight there was never another word about Gary and Chandra.

Since the early ’80s the numbers watching the major networks have been dropping. The introduction of cable TV was a double edged sword. Cable gave viewers a better, more consistent signal. But for the networks, it introduced competition from smaller channels like CNN, the Weather Channel, and ESPN. Then came the Internet, allowing people to get their news elsewhere, away from the perceived biases in the networks. The result has been fewer viewers and lower revenue. This has caused the television news industry to search for new dramatic stories that will sell the news. Enter global warming.

As the audience continues to decline, the industry looks for ways to keep viewers. The industry has always employed consultants who do market research so the network managers can make informed decisions. In the ’90s the consultants were saying, “Do more weather.” The network meteorologists began to get more airtime. Weather events that formerly would have been left to the meteorologist to report halfway through the newscast were elevated to the day’s top story. It is only natural that global warming became part of this. Since the global warming alarmists claim it will affect everything and everyone on earth, the number of news angles is virtually endless. This story is far too valuable to kill by reporting that the whole thing might be just nature doing what nature has always done: change.

The mainstream media has a strong motivation to pursue the global warming story in a way that fits its needs. In an environment of shrinking audiences and rapidly changing technology, global warming is just too good a hook to throw away with objective reporting. “Crisis” is a word used over and over again when referring to global warming. There is a real crisis developing, but it is not in the atmosphere. It’s on your television and in your magazines and newspapers.