"Climate Coverage Rebound? Maybe, But the Press Has a Long Way To Go"

"There are signs that climate-change coverage is poised for a rebound after three years of decline, experts say, but the media continue to pay it scant attention, and a lot would need to happen in 2013 to change that."



"Last week, The Daily Climate, a website that tracks stories about climate change, released the annual analysis of its global English-language media archive, which found a 2.4 percent decline in 2012 from 2011. But with a database of 18,000 posts, that’s probably within the margin of error, according to the site’s editor Douglas Fischer, and for the first time, his results didn’t gibe with those of other leading researchers.

The University of Colorado’s Max Boykoff, who has tracked climate coverage in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times since 2000, charted about a 42 percent year-to-year uptick at the five papers in 2012. Radford University’s Bill Kovarik told Fischer he measured a 10 percent overall rise at those papers, minus the Los Angeles Times. And Drexel University’s Robert Brulle, who has tracked climate coverage on NBC, CBS, and ABC since the 1980s, said that the networks had almost doubled their coverage, producing 29 stories in 2012 compared with 15 in 2011."

Curtis Brainard reports for the Columbia Journalism Review's The Observatory blog January 7, 2013.
 

Source: Columbia Journalism Review, 01/09/2013