Covering global warming in dubious times: Environmental reporters in the new media ecosystem

Abstract

With every Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the predicted consequences of global warming become increasingly dire. Yet public engagement on the issue, particularly in the United States, lags far behind what is required for collective action. There is therefore an urgent need for vigorous and engaging journalism on climate science and policy-making. Unfortunately, the profession of journalism is currently experiencing an unprecedented period of ferment, as media firms experiment with new ways to expand profits in a rapidly changing media ecosystem. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this article examines how environmental journalists have coped with the challenge of covering climate change in the context of a restructuring news industry. The interviews reveal that, despite the challenges they face – particularly regarding the complexity of the issue and their own economic insecurity – environmental journalists have developed a number of creative strategies for getting climate change stories past editors and in front of audiences. A concluding section draws on a cultural industries approach to studying media institutions in order to evaluate both the promise and limits of these individual acts of creativity.

Keywords

Climate change cultural industries environment professional norms science journalism

Established in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has to date released five reports on the risks we face from a warming planet, and with each successive release, the warnings get more and more dire (IPCC, 2014). Yet, despite this increasing urgency, the level of public knowledge – particularly in the United States – lags disturbingly behind the science. For example, although two-thirds of American adults believe global warming is indeed occurring, less than half believe it is human-caused (Leiserowitz et al., 2014). Perhaps most alarmingly, public engagement with the issue lags as well. Although nearly three of four Americans said that global warming should be at least a ‘medium’ public policy priority, respondents to a national survey ranked global warming eleventh in importance on a list of 13 public policy issues (Leiserowitz et al., 2013). Overall, in short, it is difficult to imagine that collective action to address global warming is possible given current levels of public knowledge and engagement.

The public’s overall disengagement from the threat posed by climate change raises the crucial question of the news media. Global warming is an issue that, by definition, transcends our immediate experience. For this reason, to paraphrase Shanahan and Morgan (1999), much of what we know (or think we know) about global warming necessarily comes from what we encounter in our media environment. How journalists and editors decide to cover the issue can therefore exert a powerful pull on public perceptions – and, indeed, this is what the balance of previous media effects research on global warming coverage has found (see especially Zhao, 2009; Zhao et al., 2011).

At the same time, although much research has explored the content of global warming coverage and its impact on audiences, few studies have examined one of the most important producers of global warming information – science and environmental journalists. This is an unfortunate oversight. Despite the rise of the new media ecosystem – an ecosystem that includes multinational news firms, niche online blogs, and user-generated content circulated on social media – science and environmental journalists still occupy a crucial mediating position between scientific knowledge about the environment and the general public (Fahy and Nisbet, 2011).¹ For one, science and environmental reporters are typically specialists with the training to cover not only the continuing development of environmental science but also how ecological issues connect with fields as diverse as energy, technology, and public policy. As such, science and environment beat writers are in the best position to produce coverage that not only captures the complexities of climate science and policy, but which also translates these complexities in ways that lay audiences might find compelling.²

Furthermore, as we will discuss in more detail below, science and environmental reporters deserve close study because they have had the dubious honor of working on the bleeding edge of a restructuring news industry, as firms relentlessly cut costs by shedding full-time specialists in favor of a contingent workforce of general assignment and freelance reporters (Deuze, 2008; Deuze et al., 2010). In this way, science and environmental journalists merit scrutiny not only because they occupy a crucial node in the circulation of climate change information, but also because they serve as a sort of ‘indicator species’ with regard to the long-term fate of other beat writers in a quickly changing news ecosystem.

However, despite their central position at the intersection of scientific research, journalism, and public knowledge, media scholars still know relatively little about the professional practices and norms of science and environmental journalists and how these practices and norms shape the production of climate coverage. This study is one attempt to address this gap. Drawing on in-depth interviews with climate change reporters working across multiple media platforms, this study examines the challenges science and environmental reporters face in covering global warming as well as the strategies they use to confront these challenges.

In particular, this study explores how recent changes in the news industry – including the rise of online news sources, falling advertising revenues, and accelerating layoffs – have affected the practice of science and environmental journalism in the United States. How have science and environmental reporters coped with or adapted to these economic changes? More importantly, perhaps, how have these changes, in their view, affected their ability to produce high-quality journalism on climate change?

To address these questions, this article begins with a review of recent research on media coverage of global warming, with a particular focus on studies which examine the production of global warming news. In this literature review, we will also discuss our primary theoretical framework, the political economy of communication, and in particular our adoption of a ‘cultural industries’ approach to studying the relationships between media institutions and news workers. Next, after a discussion of our study’s interview methodology, the article then turns to the experiences and perspectives of our small sample of environmental reporters. What we will discover is that, despite the many challenges they face, environmental journalists have nonetheless developed a number of creative strategies for getting climate change stories past apathetic editors and in front of readers and viewers. A concluding section discusses the promise as well as the limits of these individual acts of creativity before ending with some recommendations for future research on science journalism and the production of climate change news.

Literature review

To date, most studies on climate change news have focused either on patterns of content or audience effects rather than on studies of news organizations and news workers. With regard to overall patterns of coverage, although reporting on global warming has increased over the past 25 years, the issue still lags woefully behind the coverage afforded to other social and political issues, receiving just a fraction of the attention devoted to the economy, health care, and crime (Boykoff, 2011; Nisbet et al., 2010).

More importantly, the research suggests that, when journalists do turn their attention to global warming, they have often framed the issue is ways that impede, rather than enhance, public understanding. For example, in one influential study, Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) argued that journalists often uncritically applied professional norms of balance and objectivity in their reporting of climate science, thus giving climate change deniers ‘equal time’ – a practice which downplays the true level of scientific consensus, cultivates a sense of uncertainty among news consumers, and undermines the political will to act. In subsequent years, numerous communication scholars also produced studies that documented and critiqued this practice of ‘balancing’ scientists with climate change deniers (see especially Boykoff, 2008; Carvalho, 2005; Dispensa and Brulle, 2003; Huertas and Kriegsman, 2014; Jacques et al., 2008; Zehr, 2000). This said, however, more recent research suggests that the grip of ‘he said/she said’ reporting has loosened somewhat of late, with reporters now less likely to seek out climate skeptics and more likely to frame the science as settled and non-controversial (Boykoff, 2011; Olausson, 2009; Ward, 2008).

If accurate, this claim of a shift away from the ‘false balance’ coverage of the past is potentially quite significant, because research also suggests that how journalists choose to cover and frame climate change matters. In short, decisions about who to source, how to communicate uncertainty, and even choices of basic terminology can subtly shape how the public understands the issue, including, as numerous studies suggest, their overall level of knowledge as well as their specific views on the causes of climate change, the severity of the problem, and the level of consensus among scientists (Feldman et al., 2012; Kahan et al., 2011; Zhao et al., 2011).

For this reason, learning more about how journalists perceive their jobs and produce their stories would seem to be a necessary part of understanding how particular framings of climate change find prominence within the public sphere. At this point, however, relatively little research has been conducted on how journalists perceive climate change, how they go about the daily business of covering and framing the issue, and, in particular, how the organizational and economic changes sweeping the industry have affected their ability to produce what they view as high-quality climate coverage.

This said, there are nonetheless a few important precedents to our research. In two separate studies, for example, Boykoff (2007) and Smith (2005) interviewed science journalists to explore the tension between a cautious scientific culture which modulates and hedges knowledge claims and the norms of journalism which amplify conflict and drama. It is this tension between professional cultures which, in their view, explains those instances when journalists fail to accurately portray the state of scientific consensus and over-emphasize the voices of climate skeptics affiliated with carbon-producing industries. Finally, in perhaps the most closely related study, Fahy and Nisbet (2011) interviewed science journalists to learn about how recent technological changes in the news industry – in particular the proliferation of online news sources and science blogs – have affected how science journalists think about their professional roles and their relationship to audiences. However, although the authors briefly touched on the dramatic economic changes within the news industry, examining the consequences of these changes on the work lives of science and environmental journalists was not their primary focus, nor was their article centered on how these economic transformations have influenced journalists’ ability to cover global warming in particular.

As a result, to fill this gap, we interviewed a small sample of environmental journalists working across multiple media platforms, each of whom devote a substantial portion of their work lives to covering climate change. As discussed below, we recruited purposefully to find reporters who self-identified as environmental journalists and who focused primarily on reporting the science of climate change to popular audiences (as opposed to the politics of the issue). In particular, this study draws on these interviews to explore the following research questions:

What are the views of science and environmental journalists regarding the economic changes in the news industry and the future of climate change coverage in the United States?

Have these changes affected the ability of journalists to provide high-quality coverage of climate change? If so, how?

How have journalists responded to these changes in order to provide what they define as high-quality coverage of climate change?

To explore these questions, this study draws on the theoretical framework of the political economy of communication (PEC). As Mosco (2009) notes, PEC offers a theoretical approach to the study of media which explores the production and distribution of media resources and how the production of these resources has developed over time. In particular, PEC scholars examine economic relationships within the media industries (including the relationships between investors, managers, workers, regulators, and consumers), and they explore how these economic relationships shape the production of media content, technologies, and services (including the production of news).

More specifically, within the larger field of political economy, this project takes a ‘cultural industries’ approach to studying the production of climate change news. As Hesmondhalgh (2012) explains, if traditional PEC scholarship focused on the influence of owners and advertisers on media content, a ‘cultural industries’ approach to media institutions focuses instead on the work practices and organizational cultures of cultural workers. To be sure, as Hesmondhalgh (2012) argues, it indeed matters whether ownership of media firms is concentrated or distributed, and it matters if funding comes from individuals, advertisers, or the government. At the same, to better understand the relationship between the commercial strategies of media firms and the kinds of media content produced by these firms, you must at some point engage with cultural workers and their actual work practices and norms. And, as Hesmondhalgh (2012) and Havens and Lotz (2011) have found, cultural workers like journalists can often find creative ways to produce innovative and challenging content, even within an institutional context dominated by commercial imperatives.

Drawing on this ‘cultural industries’ approach to PEC, we now turn to our interview study of environmental and science journalists. The following sections lay out the study’s interpretive interview methodology before moving into a discussion of our findings, which, as we will see, focus attention on the creative means through which individual journalists have responded to the complex challenge of covering global warming, even as the economic foundation of their profession crumbles beneath them.

Methods

This study employed a qualitative interview methodology in line with the broader assumptions of interpretive social science (Neuman, 1997). In the interpretive tradition, the primary purpose of qualitative interviews is to create structured conversations which explore participants’ experiences and beliefs with the overall aim of developing a nuanced understanding of how they interpret their lifeworld (Lindlof and Taylor, 2011). At the same time, this study supplements this broadly interpretive approach with a commitment to critical inquiry. In our view, this commitment to critique carries with it a responsibility to situate participants’ self-understandings within a broader social, economic, and historical context – a context infused with relations of power and inequality (Radway, 1986). With regard to our interviews of journalists, our commitment to critical inquiry led us to consider the perspectives of science and environmental journalists within the context of a rapidly transforming news industry, a period in which the managers of commercial media firms are continually experimenting with ways to better exploit the labor of reporters – or even to by-pass reporters entirely by crowd sourcing news production to unpaid amateurs (Fuchs, 2014; McKercher and Mosco, 2008).

Drawing on these methodological commitments, we recruited our sample of 10 science journalists between 2009 and 2014. Seven of our participants were recruited through directories of leading professional associations representing environmental journalists in the United States, and two were referred to us from academic colleagues. The final participant was recruited from the alumni website of a graduate journalism program. In this way, all 10 participants were recruited purposefully and were interviewed if an initial screening conversation confirmed they had experience covering climate change. The journalists themselves brought a wide range of professional experiences to the study. The sample included three journalists working in public radio, three in print media, three writing for niche online outlets, and one local television reporter. Six of the ten journalists worked for public or non-profit media outlets, while four worked in commercial media. Overall, our journalists were very experienced. Nine were seasoned veterans, with between 8 and 20 years of professional experience, while the remaining journalist was in his first job out of graduate school. Finally, with regard to their employment status, eight of our journalists were currently employed full-time as reporters, while two were professional freelancers (although others had also worked as freelancers at some point in their careers).

Although small, a sample of this size is not unusual in qualitative research, and as will be seen, the patterns of discourse that emerged across these interviews were strong and consistent. Furthermore, in line with the goals of interpretive research, our objective is not to generalize from these interviews, but rather to describe in rich detail how these particular science and environmental journalists understand their work in the context of a transforming news industry. We leave it to other researchers to judge if our interpretations of these journalists’ experiences and perspectives are transferable to other contexts and settings (Lincoln and Guba, 1985).

The interviews themselves were conducted over the phone and lasted approximately 45 minutes. Participants all gave their informed consent and were promised confidentiality. As a result, their identities are concealed and references to their employers have been scrubbed from this article. The interview guide asked a series of questions designed to explore participants’ experiences covering climate change, their views on recent industry-wide changes, their perceptions of past and present climate coverage, and their hopes for what audiences might derive from their news stories. Eight of the ten interviews were audio-recorded and fully transcribed, resulting in 125 pages of double-spaced transcripts. Researchers took detailed notes on the two interviews which were not audio-recorded. For this reason, no verbatim quotes from these two interviews appear in this article, though their perspectives are included in the analysis below.

Taken together, these transcripts and notes were then analyzed via a process of open coding derived from Charmaz’s (2006) constructivist approach to building grounded theory. As Charmaz notes, as opposed to the more positivist empiricism of Glaser and Strauss (1967), a constructivist approach opens space for interpreting data theoretically at earlier stages of analysis, making it more compatible with our commitment to critical inquiry. Following this process, we affixed labels or ‘codes’ to individual items of data as we scanned the transcripts line-by-line. Similar codes were then grouped, in subsequent passes through the data, into larger-order categories using a process of constant comparison (Seale, 1999). Finally, in a concluding stage, we examined the most robust or saturated categories which emerged from this process and worked to delineate conceptual dimensions within these categories as well as interpret the inter-relationships among them (Charmaz, 2006). The goal was to develop a broader sense of the connections between the categories and how they added up to a cohesive interpretation of the self-understandings of our journalists. These self-understandings were then placed, following the commitments of critical inquiry, into the broader historical and economic context of the news industry to produce the analysis reported below.

Findings

Overall, three broad categories emerged from our qualitative interviews: (1) issue challenges, (2) recent coverage trends, and (3) industry trends. Taken together, these categories depict a media ecosystem that is, in the main, hostile to the production of high-quality climate change news, both in terms of the issue’s global scope and its local consequences and impacts. At the same time, we found that our sample of reporters also discussed a variety of tactics for navigating this hostile environment in order to get compelling stories of global warming onto the public agenda.

Issue challenges: Global, complex, and depressing

The first category to emerge from data analysis concerned the daunting challenges of covering an issue as complex and global in scope as climate change. According to our reporters, the issue of climate change is not only notoriously difficult for audiences to visualize and grasp, but, at least until recently, most audiences have viewed it as utterly distant from their everyday lives. As one reporter told us, ‘people, they think it’s a story that’s relegated to the icecaps’, or, as another reporter said, quoting a colleague from the New York Times, ‘we’ll never see a headline that says “climate change broke out today”. It’s incremental. It’s glacial – no pun intended, and … you can’t hold it in your hand’. In a similar vein, the global scale of the issue also presents a challenge. As one freelance magazine writer noted, ‘one of the difficulties is … that climate change happens on a really, really, really big scale and it is hard to talk about particular events and particular places’.

Moreover, if climate change is complex and global in scale, it is also, in a word, depressing. Not surprisingly, then, the grim nature of the issue presents a sobering challenge for environmental journalists. As one public radio reporter said,

I think the hardest thing in covering climate change is that it’s all bad news … Because frankly, I mean myself included, it’s really hard at the end of the day to go home and pick up an article that’s about how … people [who] live in lowlands in New Orleans are going to be homeless soon. I mean, nobody wants to read that stuff.

Finally, our reporters also pointed to the challenge of getting their editors on board with climate change coverage. As one local TV reporter told us, editors know that audiences struggle with the issue, so they often take a dim view of extending steady coverage to it. In fact, one freelance reporter recalled numerous phone calls with editors who have said some version of ‘oh, that sounds like an interesting story, but we already did a climate change story this year’. Therefore, when facing skeptical editors, reporters must come up with strategies for convincing them that ‘these stories can be done in a compelling and interesting way’, as a local TV reporter said. ‘I think good reporters can do that’, he added. We will return to some of these strategies in the sections that follow.

Coverage trends: Moving beyond false balance and toward local effects

It is at this point in the interviews, just after they detailed what makes covering climate change challenging, that reporters would often begin to discuss their perceptions of recent coverage trends. And, by and large, our reporters felt positively about the trajectory of coverage within the field. Importantly, and against the grain of previous research (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004), these reporters felt strongly that most environmental journalists had moved beyond ‘balance as bias’ coverage. In other words, for our journalists, climate deniers have largely lost their ‘media standing’ and are no longer viewed as credible experts on climate issues (Gamson and Wolfsfeld, 1993).

As one reporter said, ‘there is pretty much understanding across the board in the Unites States media now that this is real, this is true, it’s happening, [and] we’re responsible. That debate is over’. For this reason, he concluded, ‘in this day and age, including climate denialists in a story about climate change is generally irrelevant’. Interestingly, other journalists noted that this practice of ignoring skeptics was largely supported by their managers and editors. In fact, one reporter’s news organization had recently developed an explicit editorial policy discouraging reporters from quoting climate change deniers in environment or science coverage. It appears, in short, that the grip of ‘balance as bias’ coverage has loosened considerably, at least among the journalists interviewed for this study.

Second, if our reporters perceived a rapid movement away from covering skeptics, they also saw their colleagues turning toward providing more coverage of the local and regional impacts of climate change. According to our reporters, there were multiple reasons for this push to find a ‘local angle’ on global warming, but chief among them was the need (as discussed above) to engage readers. As one freelance reporter explained,

Part of the reason why [climate change has] been so hard to cover is because, until fairly recently, it wasn’t really impacting that many people here in the U.S. And I think that makes it kind of intangible and hard for people to grasp. And so I think the best climate coverage really is local and sort of shows how people are being affected.

To this end, reporters described numerous cases of localized coverage from their own work and the work of others, including stories on wildfires in Colorado, coastal flooding in Miami, the changing migration patterns of Monarch butterflies, and more frequent and severe mudslides in Washington State. In all these examples, reporters sought to connect the dots between these important local events and the wider reality of a warming climate.

Finally, in terms of coverage trends, our reporters also discussed how in recent years climate change coverage has migrated to other ‘desks’ in the newsroom or has been ‘folded into’ coverage of other issues, such as endangered species, storms and disasters, energy, and, of course, politics. As one public radio reporter noted, now that most journalists have internalized the settled science around climate change, there has been ‘a seismic shift in the coverage’. All of a sudden, he said, ‘science becomes less important and policy becomes a lot more important, and energy development and technology become so much more important’. Following this seismic shift, our reporters argued that climate change is now covered less often as a stand-alone issue (Is it happening? What is causing it?) and instead has become, as one freelance journalist explained, ‘a huge sort of sprawling issue that sort of touches everything’. As a result, science and environment reporters are folding, or, as one reporter put it, ‘weaving’ climate science into a wide diversity of stories across multiple journalistic ‘beats’ and specialties.

Many participants felt that this ‘weaving’ of climate coverage into a host of other stories was, on balance, a positive development. For instance, one freelance journalist felt she had an easier time pitching editors on stories about clean energy or endangered species than about climate change specifically. Then, once her editors were on board, she could fold global warming into the story as a ‘looming driving force’ in the narrative. In her experience, these inter-woven stories seemed to ‘have some resonance’ with editors, while also offering journalists who care about climate change new and fresh ways of talking about the issue.

At the same time, it would be misleading to suggest that the practice of ‘folding’ or ‘weaving’ climate change information into a host of other stories was evidence of the increasing power and status of environmental journalists in the newsroom. Instead, more accurately, this practice should be viewed as tactical response to an ongoing crisis within environmental journalism more broadly. For instance, at the beginning of our study, in 2009, one participant spoke glowingly of the New York Times’ decision to create a ‘swat team’ of eight reporters devoted full-time to covering environmental science and politics. Just a few years later, however, this bold experiment collapsed, and our participants were lamenting the re-assignment of this environmental ‘swat team’ to other desks at the Times. In this way, coverage of climate change may be migrating to other desks and getting ‘folded’ into other stories not because the complexity of the issue demands it, but rather because environmental journalists are themselves being forced to migrate from their specialist beats. In short, as environmental journalists are displaced from their specialties and forced by media managers to work as general assignment reporters, freelancers, and other journalistic jacks-of-all-trades, they are taking their expertise on climate change with them and weaving it into all manner of stories. Whether these profound economic and organizational changes – and the ongoing destruction of the environmental beat – add up to higher quality coverage of global warming is an open question, and it is toward a discussion of these economic changes that we turn to next.

Industry trends: The disappearing environmental beat and the ambivalent rise of online news

Given this context, it was perhaps not surprising that our reporters talked at length about the organizational changes sweeping across the contemporary newsroom. And they are by no means alone. The ‘death of print’, the rise of the blogosphere, and the dramatic loss of reporting jobs have all been dissected in great detail by academics and professional critics alike. However, as McChesney and Nichols (2010) argue, to pin this industrial ferment solely on the rise of online news would be a serious mistake. Instead, the changes should be viewed as the culmination of a long-term project of economic restructuring, undertaken by management to pursue the timeless aims of investors: cutting costs, extending control over the work process, undermining collective bargaining, and increasing the productivity of labor (Deuze et al., 2010; Fuchs, 2014; McKercher and Mosco, 2008).

In terms of newsroom staffing, this long-term project of restructuring has often led to the creation of a core-periphery labor structure, in which news firms downsize to a small ‘core’ of full-time managers and staffers, who are supported by an extensive web of freelance contractors contributing stories on a part-time basis. In this way, as Deuze (2008) notes, the ‘atypical’ journalist – that is, the freelancer – has in fact become quite typical, in some estimates comprising up to one-third or more of the overall reporting workforce. For their part, these precarious freelancers face decreasing incomes, uncertain benefits, and overall economic insecurity. At the same time, the lucky reporters who keep their full-time jobs are endlessly pressured to increase productivity and produce more content than ever before across a variety of technological platforms (Deuze, 2008; Stevens, 2002).

According to our participants, this process of industrial restructuring, accelerating layoffs, and the move to a core-periphery workforce has hit science and environmental reporters particularly hard, and our reporters spoke eloquently about the insecurity they and their colleagues have faced over the past decade. For instance, one reporter spoke of working at a national news magazine and watching one colleague after another get laid off, until she finally received her own pink slip. Others spoke of securing jobs in a context of brutal competition, with hundreds of qualified applicants vying for a single open position at a regional public radio station. Finally, our youngest participant, a recent journalism school graduate, noted that only one of his fellow graduates had managed to land a traditional reporting job straight out of grad school. He himself felt lucky to find work with an online trade publication owned by environmental technology firm – in short, a position equal parts journalism and public relations.

Overall, then, the respondents painted a fairly grim picture. As managers look to cut staff, their first targets are often specialist reporters pursuing beats viewed as less central to the core news agenda – including, of course, science and the environment. When their beats are cut, these specialists are either transferred within the firm into general assignment work or simply laid off. At that point, they often find themselves forced into the precarious world of freelance journalism. As one reporter recalled, ‘I started freelancing when I was laid off. I actually wanted to freelance anyway, but getting laid off made it really easy’.

Although respondents pointed to a few positives related to an increased reliance on freelancers, the dominant view was that, overall, these staffing changes threatened to undermine the quality of climate change coverage. Consider the move from specialists to generalists in the contemporary newsroom. Typically, general assignment reporters are harried, overworked, and lack expertise on climate science or policy. As a result, they cannot be expected to produce quality work. As one public radio reporter explained,

when you have a general assignment reporter who might take this up if they have a spare minute, you’re not getting the quality that you’d get when you have people that are focusing on arguably what is one of the most complex scientific stories anybody’s had to deal with, ever.

More generally, participants worried that coverage produced by generalists and freelancers would be ‘cursory’ and ‘less in-depth’. Specialists, on the other hand, had the expertise and background to produce ‘more compelling’ stories which ‘relate to people’s lives’ and which make global warming seem ‘less removed and more immediate’. But these were precisely the reporters who were most likely to get laid off or re-assigned first.

In addition, a number of participants also feared that this shift from specialists to generalists meant, quite possibly, a return back to the low-quality, ‘false balance’ coverage discussed by Boykoff and Boykoff (2004). As one freelance journalist argued, when general assignment reporters try to cover a complex issue like climate change, they are often under intense deadline pressures. Without time to ‘pick up the nuances’ or ‘really learn the science’, and, crucially, lacking the expertise of a dedicated environmental journalist, they can easily fall back on:

the kind of coverage we had … like a decade or so ago, which was this kind of ‘he said, she said’ coverage … where it was, you know, ‘I’m going to interview this climate scientist, then I’m going to interview this politician who doesn’t believe in climate change for balance’.

In other words, the easiest climate change story to write is the false balance story. It simply requires two phone calls to two (ideologically opposed) think tanks. And it is the harried, overworked generalist – the new darling of media managers and shareholders – who is most likely to produce this kind of story.

Finally, beyond the shift from full-time specialists to generalists and freelancers, our reporters also discussed one other trend in the news business – the rise of science blogs and specialty online outlets like Climate Central and Climate Wire. These outlets focus narrowly on environmental news and are targeted to a narrow slice of readers already engaged with climate science and policy. And interestingly, despite their status as havens for specialist reporting, our reporters expressed mixed feelings about the rise of these niche online sources.

On the one hand, in a positive vein, these niche outlets provide a vehicle for sustained and in-depth coverage of climate change – an issue that, as we’ve seen, typically only gets sporadic coverage in the traditional press. Moreover, these outlets typically produce stories where, according to one reporter, ‘the quality of writing about climate and about science in general is actually still pretty high’ – possibly because, as this participant opined, they rely disproportionately on younger journalists who are eager to make their mark and willing to work for peanuts. Finally, one reporter also noted that because some of these outlets (e.g. Climate Central) are funded by non-profit foundations, they can pursue climate stories free of the influence of corporate managers and advertisers who might take a dim view of environmental coverage more generally.

At the same time, our reporters also expressed some concerns about a future of climate coverage provided primarily by niche blogs and other specialty online sources. One public radio reporter, for instance, felt that the online windows of major news organizations were siphoning away resources from the traditional news platforms – a dubious tradeoff given that traditional platforms (print and broadcasting) still reach vastly wider audiences. More generally, the concern that online climate coverage has become, paraphrasing one reporter, niche journalism for a niche audience, came up numerous times in the interviews. What happens to public engagement, in other words, when high-quality coverage of climate change migrates to online sources like Climate Central or Climate Wire? Will high-quality climate coverage reach only a particular ‘information cocoon’ (Sunstein, 2009) comprised of blogs communicating climate science to a narrow audience of the already-engaged? And what about the rest of the public? What about the less-engaged or even those vaguely skeptical about the whole thing? Where will they get their climate news?

As one public radio reporter noted,

you know, people have pretty good prejudices about climate change in particular, and the way that the news industry is getting Balkanized like this … it’s much easier for people just to seek out information or points of view that reinforce their own prejudices.

In short, although niche science and environment blogs have created new (if under-funded) spaces for specialist reporters to pursue high-quality climate change coverage, their arrival has accelerated a worrying trend noted frequently elsewhere: the fragmentation of the public sphere into a series of hermetically sealed, ideological echo chambers (Jamieson and Cappella, 2010; Sunstein, 2009).

Discussion

Overall, then, our reporters described a rapidly changing media ecosystem that, all things considered, presents some daunting challenges to the production of high-quality climate coverage. These challenges begin with the issue itself; as a news story, climate change violates almost all of the traditional definitions of newsworthiness. Climate change is global, not local. It is chronic and slow-moving, not episodic or event-driven. As an issue, it is neither dramatic nor does it have an immediately obvious ‘human face’. As such, environment and science reporters must work harder than most to convince editors and audiences to engage with the issue. On this point, however, our reporters were more optimistic. There are a lot of talented reporters out there, they noted. And these reporters have moved well beyond the ‘he said/she said’ coverage of the past to explore the regional consequences of climate change as well as the connections between a global warming and a whole host of other social, technological, and political issues. Coverage of climate change, in short, is richer, deeper, and more complex today than ever before.

At the same time, these gains in the overall quality of coverage have been threatened by another emergent dimension of the new media ecosystem – the ongoing technological and organizational restructuring of the American news industry. As media managers discipline news workers in hopes of restoring and expanding profits, specialists in science and environmental news are re-assigned as general assignment reporters or simply laid off. To cut costs further, firms then turn to freelancers working on temporary contracts. The unhappy result is that the very reporters most capable of producing the kinds of climate coverage that can engage audiences and make a difference – full-time specialists laser-focused on the environment beat – are becoming an increasingly endangered species in their own right.

So, in the end, we face a paradox. At the same moment that science and environmental journalists are finally figuring out how to make climate change connect with audiences, the aggressive accumulation strategies of media firms have undermined the very conditions needed to sustain this coverage. This said, our reporters have not remained passive in the face of these worrying trends. As we have seen, even as the political economy of their profession shifts under their feet, they have continually searched for creative ways to push through the challenges they face in order to produce high-quality coverage.

In this, their stories of creative professional struggle underline the merits of a ‘cultural industries’ approach to studying the political economy of the media industries (Havens and Lotz, 2011; Hesmondhalgh, 2012). As cultural industries scholars have argued, the particular nature of cultural production means that cultural workers are typically afforded some measure of professional autonomy in their work process (Hesmondhalgh, 2012). Although media managers unceasingly attempt to chain this creativity to narrow commercial imperatives or push economic risks onto workers instead of firms, they are in the end dependent on something that cannot completely control – the creative capacities of their workforce (Dyer-Witheford, 1999). They must, therefore, give this workforce some autonomy, some room for maneuver, or otherwise risk killing off, so to speak, the goose that lays the golden eggs. It is for this reason that cultural workers can, upon occasion, find ingenious ways to work against the insatiable commercial imperatives of media firms to produce content that advances their individual creative and professional goals (Gitlin, 1994).

In this case, as we have already seen, our reporters demonstrated this creativity and autonomy in a number of intriguing ways. Charged with covering an issue of daunting complexity, they have pushed climate change news toward an engagement with local and regional impacts. Forced by newsroom cutbacks to leave the environment beat, these former full-time specialists have responded by ‘weaving’ climate change coverage into a whole range of social, political, and environmental stories – not for ideological reasons, but rather because climate change has become the crucial and unavoidable context for stories as diverse as the changing migration patterns of butterflies and the declining value of coastal property.

Finally, forced into freelancing and a precarious and contingent work life, many environmental reporters have found creative ways to pull on a variety of institutional resources to support their work. For instance, one participant talked about how, as a freelancer, she relied heavily on her professional network of contacts to keep covering science issues she felt passionately about. For her part, another respondent spoke of the necessity of creatively piecing together grant funding to support particularly ambitious projects. Although one can ask if it is wise, from a public interest standpoint, to have high-quality climate coverage depend on the individual initiative of freelance journalists, nonetheless our participants demonstrated an impressive capacity to find resources, carve out spaces of autonomy, and produce what they regarded as first-rate environmental journalism.

So what is to be done? In other words, what do these findings suggest for the future of research on environmental journalism, and, in particular, how might advocates intervene to better support the production of high-quality climate coverage? To be sure, our analysis and by extension any recommendations we make must be viewed as provisional and suggestive due to our small and purposeful sample of reporters. At the same time, our interviews provisionally suggest that the traditional professional norms of reporters – norms like neutrality, accuracy, context, and immediacy – can, under certain conditions, support rather than undermine the production of high-quality environmental coverage. For our reporters, in fact, these traditional news values were applied to produce coverage well beyond – and in their view far superior to – the ‘false balance’ or ‘he said/she said’ frames of the past.

Interestingly, this finding exists in some tension with earlier work on the relationship between climate change coverage and journalistic norms, especially with Boykoff and Boykoff’s (2004) finding that professional norms (such as neutrality or conflict/drama) led to systematically misleading coverage of global warming. Instead, our interviews suggest – again, provisionally – that a more complex relationship exists between journalistic norms and climate coverage, with ‘false balance’ coverage more likely to emerge under certain industrial and organizational conditions. To wit: a harried general assignment reporter producing quick-and-easy stories which apply some news values (neutrality and conflict/drama) at the expense of others (accuracy and context).

With this in mind, our interviews also suggest a potential path forward for advocates who wish to enhance the quality of climate change journalism. In particular, our interviews suggest that, far from being the source of poor coverage, the professional norms of journalism might productively be viewed as an important line of defense against the deterioration of public engagement with climate science. In professional terms, our reporters were very traditional. They were not advocates. They viewed their role primarily in informational terms. Yet it was precisely because they still clung to these traditional news values that they celebrated the very kinds of coverage – compelling, localized, contextualized, human-interest stories – which advocates would arguably most like the public to see and read.

The professional norms of journalism are, to be sure, riddled with contradictions and too often cultivate complicity with official sources and other social and political authorities (Herman and Chomsky, 2002). Yet we should not forget that, despite these limitations, the norms of independence, accuracy, and neutrality were first articulated to provide the profession with some measure of autonomy from exogenous forces and to serve as a bulwark (however imperfect) against the colonizing impulses of government and industry (Bourdieu, 1998). In our time, it seems obvious that the extent to which these norms remain in force within news organizations is the extent to which journalists remain at least somewhat protected from the worst forms of advertiser and ownership influence.

Therefore, our conversations with journalists lead us to suspect that, if advocates wish to support the production of high-quality climate change news, they should likely begin by supporting journalists. Providing support to individual journalists could include developing or enhancing grant programs for freelance science journalists. In addition, foundations and other granting agencies could also seek to support journalists whose story ideas promise to bring climate change out of the niche of science and environment blogs and into venues serving popular audiences. For their part, Nisbet and Fahy (2015), drawing on Patterson (2013), offer the intriguing suggestion of supporting a movement toward ‘knowledge-based’ journalism as a means of combating the trend toward ideologically driven coverage of science and scientific controversies. In this way, foundations could support journalists who strive to better contextualize expert knowledge claims and facilitate more civil conversations across ideological divides (Nisbet and Fahy, 2015: 2).

Finally, beyond supporting individual journalists, a more ambitious but ultimately more effective approach for foundations and policy-makers would likely involve finding innovative ways to fund the profession of journalism outside of the always-problematic and now-exhausted model of private, advertising-supported news. For their part, McChesney and Nichols (2010) offer one intriguing proposal (giving citizens publicly funded ‘vouchers’ they can use to support any non-profit media organization of their choosing), but there are no doubt many other promising ideas out there as well. The means are variable, but the goal would be the same: in this case, supporting environmental journalists and providing them with the time and resources they need to do their jobs, according to the best norms of their field, just the way they were taught in journalism school.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Timothy A Gibson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at George Mason University. His research interests include media theory, critical/cultural studies, urban studies, and the political economy of communication.

Richard T Craig is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at George Mason University. His research interests include media ownership, cultural/critical media studies, race and ethnicity, popular culture, and media political economy.

Allison C Harper is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at George Mason University. Her research interests include implicit bias, persuasion, debate, and message effects.

Jordan M Alpert is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at George Mason University. His research interests include health and organizational communication.

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