Global Warming in the Media: U.S. and Nepali coverage

This analysis of how global warming is covered in U.S. and Nepali media won the 2008 Foreign Press Association’s first place award.

By Anup Kaphle

It is the rare American, it seems, that would choose Anderson Cooper’s six-hour special “Our Planet in Peril” over his interview with Angelina Jolie. Even some of my friends dismiss articles on global warming and call Al Gore “a wacko.” Having observed the coverage of global warming as a student in this country, I feel that both the media as well as people who subscribe to it are to blame for not generating enough interest.

When Philip Sabecoff wrote about the effects that global warming would have on earth in The New York Times in 1989, very few Americans might have imagined the enormity of this natural disaster.

After then-U.S. president George H.W. Bush announced in his 1990 State of the Union address that he wanted billions of trees planted for war against polluted air, global warming became a topic of discussion not only among the educated community but also others who would otherwise have no reason to worry about the evolving crises.

However, I find the American coverage of global warming somewhat defeatist.

Mainstream media has, at times, written about effects of global warming but it lacks a robust reporting. Even some journalists – David Ignatius of The Washington Post comes first to my head – have admitted that reporters might have ignored what could be the biggest story in the history of mankind.

He nails the heart of this argument in his January 2006 column “Is it Warm in Here?” in which he wrote about what makes the news: “The fate of your local football team certainly fits the definition. So does a plane crash or a brutal murder. But how about changes in migratory patterns of butterflies?”

To most Americans, the changes in migratory patterns of butterflies or decreasing area of the Arctic ice circle might not be of much interest. But the media’s inefficiency, or more precisely ignorance, has added to people’s disinterest about the devastating effects climate change could have on life on earth.

In a 2002 research on the global warming coverage in major American newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post topped the chart. But of the 3,543 articles collected, only 5 per cent came from The Wall Street Journal, which shows how a major newspaper with a global readership has ignored reporting on global warming.

While some articles by The New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert and The Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Hotz have focused on the shrinking of the Arctic sea and thawing of the permafrost for the first time in millions of years, I don’t think most media organizations have taken climate change seriously enough to even create an environment beat.

This disregard for reporting has generated reluctance among some Americans in understanding the enormity of global warming. Many ask why we should worry about the Arctic sea right now when we have bigger problems like Iraq, Iran and Pakistan.

For most Americans, what matters are issues like Chinese toys contaminated with lead paint or the turmoil in the lives of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. People take interest in these issues because the news is presented in an appealing way that makes the public believe that they should care. As long as the media does not do a better job in explaining why the threats of global warming are more imminent than an Iranian nuclear attack, people simply won’t understand.

An American trend that surprises me is that whenever a newspaper or television presents an article or a report on global warming, they bring in someone with a counter argument against it. For something like Unidentified Flying Objects, counter arguments might be necessary. Not so much for global warming.

Ironically, I do not have good things to say about the media coverage in my own country.

Growing up in a place where the Internet was a myth until the late 1990s and international newspapers and magazines were very expensive, the knowledge of and attitude about global warming has not evolved yet.

A trend that persists in Nepali media is that when an INGO conducts a research or releases a report, only then is news worth reporting. Television media is almost out of touch with global warming.

Lately, with reports about the Himalayan glaciers melting faster than anticipated, some Nepali newspapers seem to be taking a more aggressive approach in writing about effects of global warming and what it would mean to Nepal itself.

This October, The Nepali Times, one of the leading English newspapers in the country, published a cover story titled “The Big Thaw,” which warned about threats of flashfloods due to increasing formation of glacial lakes in the Himalayas.

And that maybe the only reason that global warming is starting to make the news in a country like Nepal. As Himalayan glaciers melt, there is increasing fear among the scientific community about the decline in water supply to rivers like Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Ganges and Indus, which billions of Asians depend on for water.

Just as in the United States, it’s the subscribers that seem as disinterested as the media. Few Nepalis worry about the water supply because they have never really had sufficient water anyways. What worries them is that the altitude of Mount Everest base camp has dropped since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Sherpa first set foot on the mountain.

Again, in a country that was marred by Maoist insurgency for a decade, that has not had elections for almost another decade and whose literacy rate is less than half of the population, an issue like global warming finds no place on their interest-list.

The government officials never talks about climate change. To be candid, many don’t even know about the controversy and sheer size of this issue outside our country.

And Nepali media does not seem to be making any appealing case to them either.