The Climate Blindspot: Why The Media (Largely) Ignores Climate Change
It was a real jolt to wake yesterday to videos of bullets whizzing past Donald Trump, miraculously only grazing him. Members of his audience were less fortunate with one killed and two seriously injured in this shocking act of political violence. After a day dominating the broadcast news and websites, Trump’s brush with death was swiftly relegated in the UK press by the England mens’ football team loss to Spain in the finals of the Euros.
In this month’s Low Carbon Agenda, I reported the fact that 1300 people died of heat exhaustion during the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. 1300. Off camera and over there. And they’re not the only ones – if you read the papers cover to cover, climate-related deaths are a constant backdrop to what we consider news. Only the death of TV presenter Michael Mosley, which appears to be heat-related, made the headlines.
It is easy to get on a high horse about the way that well known people’s lives are given so much more media exposure than the hoi-polloi, and that football will always overshadow climate news, but it has always been thus. Extinction Rebellion and offshoots such as Just Stop Oil understood that it takes something disruptive to ‘cut through’ but as I’ve said before, they don’t seem to understand that publicity can be damaging as well as positive.
The problem with climate change as a news story is, of course, that it is largely invisible. Pictures of melting icebergs or palm trees bending in the teeth of a storm just don’t cut through in the way a football hitting the back of the net will. My green jujitsu approach to engagement gives engaging messages tailored to specific audiences (eg health impacts for health professionals), but I fear that trying to find a universally impactful message or image might be chasing rainbows.