Climate Change & the Media
Climate change poses a long-term threat to humanity and the Earth. Sixty percent of people get their news from TV. How are the networks reporting on the crisis? This is from a study from Media Matters, a non-profit media watchdog organization: “In 2016, evening newscasts and Sunday shows on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, collectively decreased their total coverage of climate change by 66 percent compared to the previous year, even though there were a host of important climate-related stories, including” global record-breaking temperatures, “the signing of the Paris climate agreement, and numerous climate-related extreme weather events. Apart from PBS, the networks also failed to devote significant coverage to climate-related policies, but they still found the time to uncritically air climate denial – the majority of which came from now-President Donald Trump and his team.”
Recorded at Simon Fraser University.
Speaker
Robert Hackett
Robert Hackett was a professor for more than three decades in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC. He is co-author of Journalism and Climate Crisis. He is an activist in the community-based struggle against the Trans Mountain pipeline.
R.T. Freebairn-Smith –
Mr Hackett’s recent (3 July) radio essay heard here was extraordinarily clear, on-point, and helpful to many (most) SF Bay Area KALW listeners
in sorting out key sensitivities in the media’s role in political change. He deserves a far larger audience. Has he a Ted Talk on this topic? In US telecasting,, his clarity at the very least belongs on Charlie Rose’s program, and hopefully on programs reaching much larger audiences. That will be difficult in the US: witness the air time exclusion and containment of Chomsky or even
of Bernie Sanders. Let’s try to get Mr Hackett’s analyses to far larger listening audiences, and before far more widely read journals, nationwide.