Twelve months ago, The Daily Climate, a website that produces and tracks media stories about climate change, declared that 2010 was “the year climate coverage ‘fell off the map.’” The downward spiral continued in 2011, a more recent analysis by the site found.
The number of articles, blog posts, editorials, and op-eds “declined roughly 20 percent from 2010’s levels and nearly 42 percent from 2009’s peak” according to a review of The Daily Climate’s global English-language media archive. According to a post about the findings by the site’s editor, Douglas Fischer:
The declining coverage came amid bouts of extreme weather across the globe - historic wildfires in Arizona, drought in Texas, famine in the Horn of Africa - and flashes of political frenzy. Australia’s approval of a carbon tax, the U.S. presidential election, a Congressional inquiry into the failed solar startup Solyndra all generated significant coverage within the mainstream press, but it was not enough to stem the larger trend.
Coverage dropped almost across the board among the top climate news producers.
Read the entire original article by Curtis Brainard on The Columbia Journalism Review web site.
Posted by Mary Cross on January 19, 2012 | Permalink
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