Reading the news through a climate change lens

A comment by Greta Thunberg about her confusion as to why climate change wasn’t on the news everyday

“Because if we were capable of doing this, then why weren’t we hearing about it everywhere? As soon as you turned on the television, why wasn’t the climate crisis the first thing you heard about? Headlines, radio programmes, newspapers, you would never hear about anything else, as if there was a world war going on.”

made me think about our news media and climate change. When we wonder why more people aren’t doing something about the climate emergency we need to look at the news they are getting. It isn’t in the news. In some news media such as Murdoch owned media it is still denied but mostly it is ignored. 

In Australia our public broadcaster is the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). Yet despite this summer being one climate change disaster after another (extreme bushfires in Tasmania, Victoria and Queensland, monsoonal extreme flooding in Queensland, extreme heatwaves with records broken every time, prolonged droughts and the death throes of the Murray Darling River) the ABC still rarely mentions it. Since beginning my analysis 40 days ago (while all these things were going on) the ABC mentions climate change on average 1.4 times a day. This sounds better than it is because these are not blazing headlines like Noam Chomsky says we need

but hidden at the bottom of articles in quotes from the scientists or firefighters dealing with the disasters. Almost as if they don’t want people to see them. 

The problem is partly that climate change has been politicised and the Liberal National Party Government has been hacking away at ABC funding so presumably the ABC doesn’t want to anger them any more. But I think rather than a direct edict to not mention climate change the reporters are probably self censoring rather than risk the backlash they get in the comments or social media when they do mention it.

So what do we end up with....SILENCE. The ABC is not pointing out the patterns that all these events they are reporting have a common cause and we need radical change now to combat it.

So how can you read the news through a climate lens and notice the patterns for yourself and point them out to other people?

Look for natural disasters. Sure we have always had bushfires, heatwaves, droughts, floods, cyclones but read the articles and notice how many times the words “record breaking, unprecedented, one in a hundred year, extreme” are mentioned. It is not normal to have so many hundred year events so frequently. It is not normal to have records broken continuously. It is not normal to have the fire season extended into winter and have fires that cannot be put out or defended against. 

Look for water shortages. Water shortages affecting whole towns, islands, farming communities. Australians are used to drought and store water but these are not normal events.

Look for food shortages. Since I started my close reading of the news there has been articles reporting on food shortages of honey, eggs, pork, milk, butter, oats, lemons, cauliflowers and stone fruit. Cherry orchards have pulled out thousands of trees, there has been 50% mortality of chooks in a farm during one of the many heatwaves, and now we have half a million dead cattle. If you are not reading through a climate lens you wouldn’t notice the pattern and in the shops they just import. 

Look for animal deaths. There has been at least four articles on animal extinctions, the Speckled Flying Fox is now endangered after the mass deaths in Queensland, wild horses, half a million dead cattle, and hundreds of thousands of dead fish. How many deaths do we need before we report on the major cause?

Look for climate activists. Bit hard to find in the mainstream media and when it is Murdoch media it is negative. You will also find mention of them low down in articles about fossil fuels because they are never the headline, just put in for balance.

Look at articles talking about mental health issues in rural areas due to droughts, natural disasters and business failures.

Look in the financial pages for companies with or without climate plans and slight mentions of divestment hurting fossil fuel companies and stranded assets.

Look at real estate sections and see how Tasmania markets are strong with interstate and overseas investors and Darwin is falling badly. Occasionally someone mentions how our houses are totally inadequate for heatwaves.

Just writing all this down makes me want to scream how can people not see this and make the connection that we are suffering from a climate emergency. But the media never makes the connection for them.

So what can we do?

• We can read the news media ourselves through a climate change lens and see the pattern for ourselves.
• We can talk about it with our friends, family and workmates.
• We can make comments when we see articles on social media that don’t mention climate change but should and tag the news company in them.
• We can email news media and ask them to #endclimatesilence
• We can change the headlines when we tweet news articles to reflect the real contribution from climate change and add the hashtag #endclimatesilence 
• We can write positive comments in the comments section or on social media when news media do mention climate change to help counteract the trolls who come out every time they do.

Following the ABC News and counting mentions of climate change and articles they should have/could have mentioned climate change is a project I have taken on to try and end climate silence. Maybe you could do it to your local paper or another news media?

Read the news for the silences and insist that the climate emergency is spelt out clearly for everyone.