The Media's Failure With the Biggest Story in the World

By David Ray Griffin, Clarity Press | Book Excerpt

 Insofar as it presents climate science within a false-balance framework, the media are, in effect, giving misinformation, which can be deadly. (Photo: Smokestacks via Shutterstock)

The subtitle of David Ray Griffin's new book, Unprecedented, asks the most serious question raised by global warming, Can Civilization Survive the CO2 Crisis? The book argues that of all the factors that have led to this crisis, none is more important than the failure of America's mainstream media. The following excerpt, after introducing this issue, discusses one of the most important dimensions of the media's failure. The book was published before The Guardian, which had all along provided the best coverage, began its climate-change campaign, referring to the threat from climate change as "the biggest story in the world."

Excerpt:

Why has the U.S. government not acted boldly to respond to the climate crisis? One of the reasons is that - as pointed out by James Hansen, who retired from his day job to spend more time on political efforts and communicating with the public - getting the federal government to act on global warming "likely requires public pressure."  

This is, however, an uphill battle: According to a Pew poll in 2013, only 33% of the American public consider global warming a "very serious" problem, and only 28% think that it should be a "top priority" for the politicians in Washington. Of the 21 issues tested, moreover, global warming was at the bottom of the priority list. The Washington Post's headline about the poll was: "Americans Are Less Worried about Climate Change than Almost Anyone Else." 

The main problem, Hansen said, is the existence of  "a huge gap between the public's understanding of the situation and the scientific understanding." Elaborating on this gap, he said: "There is remarkable inconsistency between the scientific story and public story. The science has become stronger and stronger over the past five years while the public perception has gone in completely the other direction."

He then added: "That is not an accident. There is a very concerted effort by people who would prefer to see business continue as usual. They have been winning the public debate with the help of tremendous resources." Hansen was thereby speaking about the disinformation campaign [funded by the fossil-fuel corporations].

The question, however, is why, even with tremendous resources, [a] small group of climate contrarians, with only a few scientists of stature, could have won the battle against the consensus of the climate scientists. According to this consensus view, global warming is real; it is due to greenhouse gases; and a continuation of business as usual will lead to terrible, even catastrophic, climate disruption. This view is truly a consensus, being shared by at least 97 percent of climate scientists, including - as reported [by geologist James L. Powell] - 99.8 percent of climate scientists who have written peer-reviewed articles on the subject. 

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