Page 45 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

28 M.E. MANN AND B. BREVINI

MM: It’s varied. I think there are great media outlets. I’ve had good
experiences here in Australia with the ABC Radio show that I did; the
Sydney Morning Herald, a wonderful newspaper with Peter Hannam—a
really great guy. There’s another person at Sydney Morning Herald—a
science person I’ve talked to before. So they do a really good job. I think
the New York Times in the US has been doing a pretty good job in cov-
ering climate issues. MSNBC, in terms of our cable networks, has done a
really good job. CNN has not done a really good job. FOX News is actively
promoting misinformation and disinformation, but yeah, you can point to
sources and journalists who are doing a really good job. I think the
problem is, with the changes in the media environment, there are fewer
and fewer positions for those sorts of journalists. Fewer resources—they’re
understaffed. They don’t have the resources that they used to have to do
really hard-hitting investigative journalism. That takes resources to be able
to do that.
I think we’ve lost something in the fragmentation of our media. It has
made it really difficult for the scientific community to clearly get its message
out because it’s so fragmented, and you have a variety of media outlets with
varying levels of facilitating and accurately reporting science-themed sto-
ries. So it’s a tough environment and it’s, in my view, some of these
problems that have led to the fact that technical issues that are contentious,
like climate change, too often get treated with false balance. Because you
know the journalist, the reporter, doesn’t have the resources to investigate
who’s right and who’s wrong—to fact check, to do the investigative work
that’s necessary … they often end up resorting to sort of the default, which
is there are two sides—and we’ll just present these two sides.
BB: Do you have solution for that? Do you think there is a solution—
to stop the media from thinking like that?
MM: Well Donald Trump has a solution. He wants to imprison all jour-
nalists except FOX News. I think that it’s difficult because of the corporate
media environment. I personally know of many cases where a journalist
wrote an article, and I spoke with the journalist and had a sense that they
were going to write a really good article. The article appears, it’s got some
problems, and there’s some fake balance—and they throw in the quotes of
some industry group and in many cases what you learn is that wasn’t the
journalist. That was their editor.