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Third World Network is also accessible on the World Wide Web. Please visit our website at http://www.twnside.org.sg 2933/06 -- Third World Network Features Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 19:56:12 +0530 From: features <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: WORLD'S MOST INFLUENTIAL NEWSPAPER FAILS February 2006 WORLD'S MOST INFLUENTIAL NEWSPAPER FAILS IN REPORTING ON GLOBAL WARMING If a majority of US citizens support action on climate change, how does their government get away with ignoring them? Largely because of the willingness of the world's most influential newspaper to toe the White House line. (First of a two-part article) By Howard Friel The New York Times is the most important newspaper in the US. Does this make it the most important newspaper in the world? If one measures the importance of a news organisation by the scale of its influence, then you could argue that the Times is both the world's most important newspaper and its most appalling journalistic failure. The intellectual establishment in the US views The New York Times as the gold standard of American journalism. 'The Times remains the most important and, on balance, the best newspaper in the world,' wrote The New Yorker's prominent political commentator, Hendrik Hertzberg, in May 2003. Actually, Hertzberg went even further. 'The Times' authority isn't just journalistic,' he said. 'It's downright ontological. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the Times defines public reality [in the US].' A month later, another commentator in The New Yorker described the influence of the Times this way: 'It is almost impossible to exaggerate the paper's significance. An event it doesn't cover might just as well not have happened.' Which, for our purposes, prompts the question: 'If the earth is warming due to man-made greenhouse-gas emissions, and the Times doesn't cover the story, will the earth still grow warmer?' Institutionally speaking, the Times doesn't care one way or the other. The acquisition of this much journalistic credibility did not result from a rigorous devotion to facts, a fearless resolve to challenge imperial presidencies or a principled devotion to the US constitution, the UN charter or the rule of law. Rather, the source of this authority is a sophisticated marketing approach to editorial policy, whereby the Times pitches its editorial products to high-end government, academic and corporate consumers the way that other big corporations pitch their high-end products to affluent customers. The New York Times is basically a Fortune 500 company that 'positions' its news stories and editorials to have broad appeal within the halls of power in government and corporate boardrooms in the US. In doing so, it is endlessly prioritising, protecting, and defending the New York Times corporate brand, rather than unselfconsciously reporting the essential facts, law or science of a given issue. This, in turn, supports its business model, which is to sell as much corporate advertising as its pages can hold, and to deliver that advertising to as many high-end readers as possible. When it comes down to it, the production of news and information at the Times is more about the Times itself and less about an enlightened democracy and a globally responsible nation. The editorial policy that perpetuates the business interests of the Times has been articulated by an unbroken succession of publishers and top editors, each of whom have described the paper as an 'impartial', 'centrist', 'non-crusading' newspaper. In practice, this means telling its readers a little bit but not too much about the vital issues of the day. Better to under-report an issue than be perceived as having a political or environmental agenda, since this would ruffle core customers and alienate corporate advertisers. This explains why there is some but not too much coverage of global warming in the Times. It also explains why the most important newspaper in the world's most powerful and polluting country has utterly failed to exercise effective journalistic oversight of US global-warming policy, and why the rest of the world's citizens are merely passive witnesses of warming events and conditions they have little power to stop. Contrary perhaps to European opinion, the much-maligned US public is less culpable with respect to global warming than the highly acclaimed New York Times is. In two public opinion polls in recent years, Americans were asked the following question: 'An international treaty calls on the US and other industrialised nations to cut back on their emissions from power plants and cars in order to reduce global warming, also known as the greenhouse effect. Some people say this would hurt the US economy and is based on uncertain science. Others say that this is needed to protect the environment and could create new business opportunities. What's your view? Do you think the US should or should not join this treaty requiring less emissions from US power plants or cars?' In its poll asking this question, ABC News reported in April 2001 that 61% of those surveyed were in favour of such a treaty and only 26% opposed. When the independent think-tank the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations asked the same question in a June 2002 poll, 70% supported a treaty and 25% were opposed. Other polls have consistently showed similar results. In addition, at least 132 US cities, including New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, New Orleans, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Denver and Salt Lake City, as well as the conservative Texas towns of Denton, Hurst, and Laredo and other small US towns, have endorsed the US Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement. By doing so, these cities have agreed: to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol emission targets through actions ranging from anti-sprawl land-use policies to urban forest-restoration projects and public-information campaigns; to urge state and federal governments to enact policies to meet or beat the protocol's suggested greenhouse-gas emission reduction target for the US (which is a 7% reduction from 1990 levels by 2012); and to urge the US Congress to pass the bipartisan Climate Stewardship Act, which would establish a national emission-trading system in the US. Other cities are expected to join this effort. Overall, a majority of the US public opposes the Bush administration's rejection of the scientific and political consensus on warming. Persuading the US to join the international consensus on global warming would mean identifying the segments of American society that have kept it from joining it to date. Obviously, President George W Bush, his administration and Congress are directly responsible for the US refusal to accept the scientific evidence and ratify the political accords on global warming. But if a majority of the American people are opposed to current US policy, how can elected US government officials continue to disregard them without political consequences? The answer to this question lies to a great extent with the power of The New York Times, the paper's indifference about the seriousness of global warming, and its unwillingness to cover the story and motivate the US electorate to pressure its government to change its policies. Without any journalistic leadership from the Times, the inattention to global warming among major US news organisations will continue. And the American people, though unimpressed with the administration's policies on the issue, have not prioritised climate change in their hierarchy of political and economic concerns. This permits Bush and co to continue coddling their big-energy supporters without sustaining political damage, which virtually guarantees no effective international action. When climate scientists from around the world gathered in Exeter in 2005 for the Met Office's Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change conference, it was one of the most important scientific events with respect to global warming since the 2001 report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Papers given at the conference indicated that the earth's climate was changing more rapidly with more dramatic effects than had been previously predicted. One such paper, according to The Independent, reported that 'researchers from the Cambridge-based British Antarctic Survey have discovered that a massive Antarctic ice sheet previously assumed to be stable may be starting to disintegrate'; and that the ice sheet's 'collapse would raise sea levels around the earth by more than 16 feet', which would put 'enormous chunks of low-lying, desperately poor countries such as Bangladesh under water - not to mention much of southern England'. The Independent reported that the conference 'heard several alarming new warnings of possible climate-related catastrophic events, including the failure of the Gulf Stream, which keeps the British Isles warm, and the melting of the ice sheet covering Greenland'. Two days later, The Independent reported a claim from the Exeter conference that 'gigantic changes to the oceans, leading to the extinction of marine life from cod to coral reefs, are likely because of' carbon dioxide emissions; that high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are 'rapidly turning the world's oceans [into] acid as [the carbon] is dissolved in seawater, putting an enormous array of marine life at risk'; and that 'ocean acidification may wipe out much of the microscopic plankton at the base of the marine food web' and is already endangering the future of coral reefs. Despite the highest professional standing of the climate scientists present, The New York Times ignored the conference and the dramatic research findings that were announced there. Two weeks later, reporting from the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The Independent said that scientists from the US Department of Energy, the US government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research 'have found the first unequivocal link between man-made greenhouse gases and a dramatic heating of the earth's oceans'. The scientists had discovered 'a "stunning" correlation between a rise in ocean temperature over the past 40 years and pollution of the atmosphere'. The Independent said they had 'destroy[ed] a central argument of global warming sceptics within the Bush administration that climate change could be a natural phenomenon', and thus 'should convince Bush to drop his objections to the Kyoto treaty'. But Bush wasn't likely to be persuaded by such evidence, in part because The New York Times and most other major US news organisations ignored it. One exception was the Knight Ridder news organisation, which reported 'new measurements from the world's oceans [giving] the most compelling evidence yet that man-made global warming is under way, and [which] hint at a more dramatic and sudden climate change in the future'. The organisation reported that Ruth curry, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, found that 'between 1965 and 1995 about 4,800 cubic miles of fresh water melted from the Arctic region and poured into the normally salty northern Atlantic'. Curry claimed that if the melting continued, 'the increased influx of fresh water could shut down the great ocean conveyor belt, which helps regulate air and water temperatures, abruptly changing the climate around the Atlantic and elsewhere'. Curry also estimated that 'if the thaw continues at current rates, the shutdown scenario would occur in about two decades'. Also highly worrisome, Curry said, is the fact that the ice of Greenland has also started to thaw. But The New York Times has imposed an almost complete blackout on the steady flow of worrisome scientific reports [in 2005] that have predicted worst-case global-warming scenarios. In January (2005), a joint international effort that included scientists from the US, the UK, China, Germany, France, Australia, Switzerland, India, and Malaysia issued a report that summarised the scientific consensus on global warming as follows: 'The vast majority of international scientists and peer-reviewed reports affirm that climate change is a serious and growing threat, leaving no country, however wealthy, immune from the extreme weather events and rising sea levels that scientists predict will occur unless action is taken.' Though the Bush administration still holds that global-warming science is uncertain, and still refuses to participate in international efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the Times ignored this report. The Times also paid no attention in May, when the UN Environment Programme convened 'an unprecedented grouping of pension funds, foundations, European investors and US state treasurers to back a new call for urgent action by the global investment community to tackle the threat of climate change'. - Third World Network Features About the writer: Howard Friel is co-author with Richard Falk of The Record of the Paper: how the New York Times misreports US foreign policy (Verso, 2004). The above article first appeared in The Ecologist (July/August 2005). When reproducing this feature, please credit Third World Network Features and (if applicable) the cooperating magazine or agency involved in the article, and give the byline. Please send us cuttings. 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