Climate change, not a topic people take lightly. With many sides to the story its hard to decide who to believe, and to know what is really happening...and papers are not helping in informing the public just what is happening in their world.
I went out yesterday and bought 4 newspapers; 'The Sun' 'The Times' 'The Daily Express' and 'The Independent'. From these 4 I found...no articles that are focus on climate change...big disappointment on my behalf. However, one article which I read in 'The Daily Express' was titled "Welcome to Artic
Now this may be an assumption, but I personally think that the papers are trying their best to not focus on the way our planet is changing, unless a natural disaster ensues, then they all flood to get the story first, to panic the public and tell them how bad weather is caused by climate change and we must do something to stop it from happening!...No, just, no. Climate change is happening, but tabloids and broadsheets are not taking it as seriously as they should.
After finding no article in 'The Sun' on climate change, I instead searched for any articles which relate to climate change on their website. Luckily one had actually been posted yesterday
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/special_events/green_week/article1871745.ece
This article talks about how scientists are trying to find new ways of combating climate change, with such methods as 'Giant mirrors' and 'covering the sea with algae' (for absorption of CO2). As it is a newspaper article, I’m very skeptical on the information presented to me, I need more scientific proof then what I read from a journalist, who probably knows less about science, and could care less about it, as long as they sell enough papers. I sound very bitter here, however, it is only due to the fact that it concerns me that the public are not being presented with all the facts and both sides of the story of climate change. How it not only affects our environment, but also our economy.
What seriously concerns me is that the facts behind each article are the same and are published over and over again, just with different scary head lines to shock people into buying news papers and feeling sorry for their actions. This is not a sustainable course of action to take; it is essentially just a scare tactic. I have read articles whereby the underlining story is how to increase sustainability, but have only read these in specific geographical magazines (such as the one my last blog was based on)
The public may find sustainable development a boring topic, as they are just being told on how to live more sustainably, and who really likes to be told what to do? Newspapers give a good portrayal of what is happening now with climate change, but so far do not seem to be emphasizing just how important sustainable development is to save the future, even if it is just to help save tomorrow from ourselves.
3 comments:
Poniesponies feels the need to agree with your wholly negative assessment of the role of the paper media in the Climate Change issue. It's not a topic that greatly enthralls many unless it affects them personally. This includes editors of newspapers. On the other hand there is no reason why we should expect the newspapers to feel the need to educate us.
It snowed on your way home and it's only October. Well why is that Global Warming? Is it that we've dropped the term 'global warming' now (because sometimes it's not warming) and replaced it with 'climate change'...
but climate always changes...it's called weather.
I totally agree, many people wish not to be educated by a newspaper, but this does not mean that editors should be allowed to curb peoples opinions to their liking. The public needs both sides of an argument to truly make up their own opinion on the situation...however some people prefer to be spoon fed all information.
Snow in October is something i'm not used. For the past few years it has snowed near or even on my birthday (in January) however it didn't this year, and instead we have snow in October.
I think the term 'global warming' has been used so much that people now have different meanings for it. After all, yes it is not always warming, but that is not a fact that is publicised to the general public often...which means they may have a different perception of what weather is.
Yes i believe that papers do blow the ideas of climate chnage out of all preportion but this is just so they can sell more papers. You always have to be wary of these and always be very critical of them (see my blog for more). This however causes a lot of problems for the general public as they become very wary of climate change and wanting to do something about it which a very big problem. I think your blog was very informative i look forward to more!
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