Worth Mentioning
December 8th, 2008 by Nick SaintVia Kevin Drum, a neat chart tracking mentions of global warming in the media:
Drum is upset that media discussion of global warming has gone down dramatically over the past two years in Europe and America, just as predictions are getting gloomier. I agree that this is too bad; people are presumably more likely to respond to a problem if it’s being discussed in the media. But media coverage is always going to depend on dramatic new developments. This is true even when the importance of an issue is huge. “The end of the world is coming” is a great headline, but “the end of the world is still coming” isn’t. Beyond merely affecting which stories are covered, this leads to distortion of how stories are covered. Take the Democratic primary this year; after Super Tuesday, sensible people crunched the numbers and saw that it was more or less all over, barring a DGLB. But Hillary obviously wasn’t going anywhere, so that story simply wouldn’t do.
In the case of global warming, I don’t think this is as big a problem as it seems. Yes, it would be nice if the media were reminding people of this problem more often, but we have already reached the point where there is a lot of political momentum, so coverage is likely to track actual political activity, rather than driving it. Not much has been going on there recently, but when cap-and-trade schemes start being debated in Congress, one should expect the volume of articles on climate change to spike.
