Documenting the False Equivalency

Some time in mid-July, climate writer and thinker Alex Steffen tweeted,

In far too many institutions, enterprises, and communities, the political midpoint of debates about climate, strategy and risk is very often an almost fringe position, when framed against the actual evidence.

By coincidence, Grist just wrote up a recently published content analysis that found exactly that. The study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, looked at 30 years of climate coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. The author compared press releases from companies, advocacy groups, and government and then looked for how much their words were used in the three newspapers:

She found that even though 10 percent of the press releases contained messaging against climate action — arguments like, “It would be too expensive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” — 14 percent of them wound up in print. By contrast, the more prevalent press releases arguing for personal, corporate, or political action to tackle climate change were only covered 7 percent of the time. And the least-covered press releases came from groups with the most expertise on science and technology, such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and IBM.

The time period studied ended in 2013, and possibly the amount of climate change denial written up  in these newspapers has lessened since then, but instead arguments for climate delay have filled the gap:

Jennifer Marlon, a senior researcher at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, acknowledged that the media environment has changed since the mid-2010s — The New York Times in particular has ramped up its climate coverage — but she suspects that false balance continues to influence the national conversation. For instance, newspapers might be better at contextualizing opponents of climate action, explaining that their views are outside the mainstream. “But those arguments are still out there and are very much in play,” Marlon said.

This media focus on false equivalency or "bothsidesism," as the article calls it, is unacceptable, and one thing I greatly appreciate about Minnesota Public Radio is that they will not broadcast any form of climate denialism.