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Man Bites Planet Climate change had always been a difficult story to infect with urgency, says Cristine Russell, a former national science reporter for The Washington Post and now a senior fellow at the Belfer Center researching media coverage of science. In the more than three decades since reports on changes in the earth's weather began appearing, stories were often buried deep in science sections, or they were focused on whether the phenomenon was happening at all. That began to change dramatically in early 2006, according to new research by Russell. Coverage in The New York Times and The Washington Post nearly tripled between the first quarter of 2006 and mid-2007 (see chart). Regional newspapers, national news magazines, and television news programs also showed dramatic increases. ---------------------------------------------------------------
The success of Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, in the spring of 2006 and the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report in early 2007 essentially marked the end of the arguments over whether climate change was real and prodded the media to look at the substance of the issue. "The story jumped out of the science pages," Russell says. And not just onto the front pages -- political, business, even travel reporters added new dimensions to the coverage. Striking visual imagery, such as melting polar ice and imperiled polar bears, helped propel coverage in television and news magazines. The tone of stories also changed. With the realization that changes were already happening, and that others were perhaps not so far off into the future as once thought, coverage was infected with that once elusive sense of urgency. "It became a story not about whether it was happening, but about why it was happening," Russell says. Interest appears not to have been temporary, the research shows, and the number of stories continues to remain high. With coverage evolving, Russell speculates, "the next era...will be about what to do about it."
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