Climate Change Coverage In A Changed Media Climate

Hayden
Donnell, Mediawatch producer

In 2021
climate change minister James Shaw talked up the
government’s commitment to the Paris Agreement on
Facebook.

“We need to cut global emissions by 45
percent, below 2010 levels, by 2030,” he said.

“Now is
the time we must decisively choose the future we want for
our children.”

The tenor of political discourse has
changed a little since then.

Our current crop of
ministers are less bullish about the transition to a
low-carbon economy.

“We’re not going to be
guilt-tripped by these fanciful accounts that the planet is
boiling. We need NZ’s natural resources!” Resources Minister
Shane Jones said Facebook last year, in a post set against a
backdrop of clipart flames.

Jones is following in the
footsteps of politicians overseas.

Donald Trump came
to office in the US with the catchy mantra “Drill Baby
Drill” in his inauguration and State of the Nation
speeches.

In some respects, the media environment has
followed a similar trajectory to the political
one.

Back when James Shaw was issuing those optimistic
pronouncements, several of our major media companies were
making their own commitments to climate action.

Stuff
had launched two long-term climate coverage
projects.

Quick!
Save The Planet was launched in 2018. The site’s editor,
Patrick Crewdson, said it wouldn’t give space to what he
called “debunked denialism”.

“We just want to really
pound away at climate change coverage on a regular basis.
Increase the intensity of it. And to make the problems of
climate change feel urgent and tangible and unignorable,” he
told Mediawatch at the time.

That morphed into The Forever
Project, launched in March 2020 just as Covid-19 locked
the country down. It was devoted to in-depth climate
coverage from science journalists like Eloise Gibson and
Olivia Wannan.

The New Zealand Herald and other media
organisations also got in on the act, signing up to the
global Covering
Climate Now initiative and creating their own climate
projects.

Fast forward to today, and the Forever
Project still exists, but doesn’t have any dedicated
reporters.

Gibson and Wannan have both left Stuff, the
former for RNZ and the latter to do communications for the
Carbon Removal Research project at the University of
Canterbury.

Jamie Morton, who did in-depth climate
reporting as a science reporter at the Herald, is now
freelancing.

Climate change has dropped down the news
agenda, and Gibson is now the only dedicated climate
reporter at a mainstream news media outlet.

This
week’s Framing
the Emergency event at AUT came at a fraught time for
the industry.

A panel of Newsroom’s Marc Daalder, TVNZ
Marae presenter Miriama Kamo and Eloise Gibson told the
gathering she got her hopes up when she saw other countries’
media teams at the COP 15 Copenhagen climate summit back in
2009.

“They would have ten people in the media room
working in shifts around the clock to cover different angles
on this crisis. I was so jealous, and I thought: ‘Is New
Zealand ever going to do this?’

“Spoiler alert: it
really did not,” she added.

Why not? The panel
pondered the parlous state of the media’s finances and
climate change being dragged into the culture
wars.

They also said despite the dearth of dedicated
climate reporters, climate denial is now uncommon – and many
journalists increasingly refer to the crisis in stories
about subjects from weather to power prices.

Climate
in the culture war

Marc Daalder – Newsroom’s senior
political reporter who covers health, energy and extremism
as well as climate change – said climate change getting
caught up in partisan battles between the right and left
made it more challenging for journalists to state the “very
basic facts” at the heart of the issue.

He pointed to
outgoing deputy prime minister Winston Peters casting
doubt on NIWA’s data last year about carbon levels in
the atmosphere. He made similar claims during
the 2023 election campaign.

“When they’re
covering the statements of politicians, it
gets really difficult,” Daalder told Mediawatch at
the AUT this week.

“I don’t think the media
has figured out how to – while maintaining
the trust of our audience – say ‘that’s
culture war BS. That’s just not a
thing’.”

Gibson pointed out that some media
organisations did fact-check
Peters’ claim.

But while doing so can prompt
accusations of bias and sometimes online abuse, she saw them
as bread and butter for news organisations.

“I
don’t think you can tailor your reporting
to what a small group of people are
going to say. You need to tailor
your reporting to what you know to
be accurate, what you know to be
representative, and what you know most
people in New Zealand want to know.
They just want to know as close as
you can get to the facts,” she
said.

“I don’t actually think that’s
a partisan or political thing to do.
It’s just doing your job.”

Stating the
facts about climate change may not be biased, but that
doesn’t mean it’s not political, Gibson said.

“I
don’t think you can separate covering
climate change from politics because
policy and economic decisions are
intrinsically tied up in climate change
action,” she said.

“You can’t not tackle
politics in that. But that’s not the
same as being partisan.”

Caught in the
cutbacks

Both Gibson and Daalder pointed to media
cutbacks as the true existential threat to climate
coverage.

Gibson was worried that low salaries and a
lack of opportunity were driving young reporters out of the
industry.

This wasn’t just a hypothetical concern. One
former young reporter who’d recently left the industry for a
climate advocacy agency was in the crowd listening to the
media panel.

“I would find it hard to
look that person in the eye and say:
‘My job is going to be here for you
in 10 years’. I hope there’ll be 10
of my jobs, 20 of my jobs – but
it’s hard.”

Daalder said that as newsrooms have
slimmed down, specialist climate coverage has been
sacrificed in favour of what editorial leaders perceive to
be ‘core news’ coverage.

Rather than resisting that,
Gibson saw a path forward for reporting that shows how
climate change impacts immediate concerns like the cost of
living.

She cited the cost of gas, changes to the
transport system, or the price of solar panels and batteries
as matters where the slow-moving climate crisis intersects
with the everyday.

“It’s not that people are
not concerned about climate change, it’s
that they have got immediate and
pressing concerns that are pushing that
out of their mind, and they don’t have
the bandwidth. And it’s so obvious now
that those two things are compatible
and connected. So you don’t have to
make it relevant. It is
relevant.”

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