The Fallacy of Balance in Communicating Climate Change

Abstract

"The media play an important role in stimulating discussion in developing countries about both the global and local phenomena associated with climate change. They are a vital link between the scene of a natural disaster and the rest of the world. The media should facilitate discussions on climate change among scientists, politicians and the public. Strong reporting on climate change impacts and solutions is needed to make the public interested in climate issues. This article examines how the media, particularly of India, covered climate change in the Himalayas. According to P.J. Shoemaker and S.D. Reese (1996), controversy is one of the main variables affecting story choice among news editors, along with human interest, prominence, timeliness, celebrity, and proximity. But controversy raises editorial issues, such as, what is the fairest way to report such hotly disputed versions of reality to an audience? The culture of political journalism has long used the notion of balanced coverage. In this construct, it is permissible to air a highly partisan opinion, provided this view is accompanied by a competing opinion. But recently, scientists and scholars have challenged the legitimacy of this journalistic core value. In a survey of 636 articles from four top United States newspapers between 1988 and 2002, M.T. Boykoff and J.M. Boykoff (2004) found that most articles gave as much time to the small group of climate change doubters as to the scientific consensus. Through the filter of balanced reporting, popular discourse has significantly diverged from scientific discourse. Given the real consensus among climatologists over global warming, many scientists find the media’s desire to portray the topic as a scientific controversy to be a distortion. Given that stories about climate change are steeped in scientific detail, communicators should convey the scientific consensus and limitations to current knowledge according more to scientific norms of evidence rather than to journalistic norms of “balance”. Wherever possible, communicators should help increase the scientific literacy of their mass audience by explaining how scientists become more confident about knowledge claims, especially regarding the use of probability statements (McCright and Shwom, 2010)."(pg 1)