By Paul Homewood
We have discussed Covering Climate Now before. It is just one of the organisations whose role is to coordinate the message when it comes to climate.
Our Story
Covering Climate Now supports, convenes, and trains journalists and newsrooms to produce rigorous climate coverage that engages audiences.
Co-founded in 2019 by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation magazine in association with the Guardian and WNYC, CCNow invites journalists everywhere to transform how our profession covers the defining story of our time. Unless news outlets around the world dramatically improve and expand their climate coverage, there simply will not be the public awareness and political will needed to tackle the crisis.
With hundreds of partner news outlets from over 60 countries reaching billions of people, CCNow helps journalists produce more informative and appealing coverage of the climate crisis and its potential solutions.
We invite journalists and newsrooms worldwide to join our community and to help all of us produce exceptional journalism that engages audiences, holds power to account, and inspires change.
https://coveringclimatenow.org/about/
I get their regular emails, including this one yesterday:
Why Don’t More Voters Care About Climate Change?
Even as deadly heat has scorched much of North and Central America this month, new polling data finds that climate change is still not a top issue for most voters. It’s important for journalists to understand why that is — and to look at their own obligation to help the public understand the monumental climate stakes of the 2024 elections.
The survey results, released by the climate change communications programs at Yale and George Mason universities last week, show that climate ranks 19th among the 28 issues that registered voters prioritize ahead of the November elections. Only President Joe Biden’s political base — liberal Democrats, who comprise roughly one-quarter of the electorate — ranked climate change among their top four issues (along with protecting democracy, abortion, and health care).
There’s a lot for journalists to consider in these results. Would climate change be a higher priority for American voters if more of them understood its connection to the dangerous heat blasting much of the world? Do voters have a clear enough understanding of how a warming climate affects every aspect of their lives?
The Guardian reported today that scientists at World Weather Attribution have concluded that the heat wave that has killed over a hundred people and withered crops across northern Central America, Mexico, and the southern US was made 35 times more likely by climate change — a ferocious start to what will undoubtedly be a brutal summer. Yet most news coverage continues to ignore the connection between climate change and extreme heat, not to mention the fact that climate change itself is driven by fossil fuel use. A new Media Matters report shows that just 12% of national TV segments aired during the recent heat wave in the southwest US made connections to climate change.
There are important exceptions that deserve praise. Almost half of CBS’s segments included explicit links between heat and climate change, far outstripping its competitors in coverage. The network’s local segments and streaming videos — which also spell out the role fossil fuels play in the heat wave — show just how easy it can be to make climate connections for audiences. (For more examples of how to make the climate connection, check out CCNow’s recent extreme heat reporting guidance.)
Those connections are key to helping voters grasp the stakes of November’s elections. “The more people understand climate change’s ‘here, now, us’ realities,” Ed Maibach, a professor at George Mason and director of the university’s Center for Climate Change Communication, told Covering Climate Now, “the more they support ambitious climate policies and candidates who will propose such policies.”
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It says a lot about how they go about spreading disinformation. And they are determined that journalists and newsrooms worldwide spread the same controlled, deceitful message.
Despite their efforts, fortunately, voters are not buying it, as their polling data shows. And is it any wonder, when ordinary people in the US are suffering from declining standards of living, mass immigration, high crime and inflation.
Expect the level of disinformation and climate propaganda to be stepped up as the US elections approach.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
https://ift.tt/D6bCRZO
June 21, 2024 at 04:36AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 