Neil deMause

How the news media dealt with — or failed to — the links between this spring’s severe weather and climate change:

On April 14, a massive storm swept down out of the Rocky Mountains into the Midwest and South, spawning more than 150 tornadoes that killed 43 people across 16 states (Capital Weather Gang, 4/18/11). It was one of the largest weather catastrophes in United States history—but was soon upstaged by an even larger storm, the 2011 Super Outbreak that spread more than 300 tornadoes across 14 states from April 25 to 28 (including an all-time one-day record of 188 twisters on April 27), killing 339 people, including 41 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama (CNN, 5/1/11).

Ensuing weeks saw Texas wildfires that had been burning since December expand to consume more than 3 million acres (Texas Forest Service, 6/28/11; CNN, 4/25/11), plus record flooding along the Mississippi River, which couldn’t contain the water from April’s storms on top of the spring snowmelt. On May 22, a super-strong F5 tornado killed 153 people as it flattened a large part of Joplin, Missouri (National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office, 5/22/11) ; in the first two weeks of June, a heat wave broke temperature records in multiple states, and the Wallow fire became the largest in Arizona state history (Washington Post, 6/14/11).

It was an unprecedented string of severe weather: By mid-June, more than 1,000 tornadoes had killed 536 people (NOAA, 6/13/11), nearly as many deaths as in the entire preceding decade. And it was only natural to ask: Were we seeing the effects of climate change?… [read more]

My Extra! magazine article on how U.S. media coverage of last fall’s elections ignored climate policy, previously print-only, is now online for free: You can read it here in its entirety, no tree-killing or money-spending necessary. (Though FAIR could certainly use your money if you want to subscribe, and their digital subscriptions save both trees and your cash!)

I have an article in the February issue of Extra! on how the U.S. news media largely ignored Republicans’ climate-change-denial rhetoric in the runup to last November’s elections, despite the fact that it could have huge consequences for the fate of the earth. It’s not online, sadly, but you can buy a copy for $4.95 at what we used to call “your local news-stand,” get an annual subscription for not much more, or wait a month or two and it should show up for free here. Here’s the intro:

Of all the issues at stake in the midterm congressional elections of 2010, the one that hung most in the balance may have been the fate of the world’s climate. It was clear from early in the election cycle that incoming Republicans were uniformly in agreement that no government action to control carbon emissions was desirable, or indeed necessary: Of Republican Senate candidates, “19 of the 20 who have taken a position say that global climate change is unproven or actually a hoax,” the National Journal’s Ron Brownstein told Christiane Amanpour (This Week, 9/26/10).

Several prominent GOP leaders had gone even further: Soon-to-be House speaker John Boehner declared that “the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, that it is harmful to our environment, is almost comical,” while Rep. John Shimkus, a contender for chair of the House Energy Committee, brushed off fears of climate disaster by citing the Bible’s promise that “as long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease” (New Yorker, 11/22/10)…

In an analysis of media coverage of the cap-and-trade climate legislation, I compare it to reporting on the health care bill, noting that in both cases journalists omitted any mention of criticism that the bills were too weak. And perfect timing too, since the climate bill just got even more like the health bill, in that Obama is backing away from trying to pass it anytime soon.

The sweeping bill to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions that moved through Congress over the last year received relatively scant media attention, taking a distant back seat to the healthcare reform bill and its attendant public uproar. And, much like the healthcare debate (Extra!, 10/09), coverage of climate-change legislation ended up obscuring the issues as much as it explained them, viewing a Democratic compromise bill through the lens of right-wing and corporate criticism, while marginalizing progressive critics who said the legislation was insufficient to the task at hand…. [read more]

As if I weren’t worried enough about the fate of the world, I picked up the Times today and read this in what was meant to be an optimistic report on how global carbon emissions have fallen as a result of the economic collapse:

The forecast should also make it easier for most nations to meet emissions reduction targets in the near and medium term and could give a lift toward a new global warming treaty, said Paul W. Bledsoe of the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan advisory group.

“Because many countries are using 2005 as a baseline year, this will give them some breathing room when economic activity picks up again,” Mr. Bledsoe said.

In other words: Nations may be willing to agree to limits on carbon emissions if they get to compare them to pre-recession levels, since this would allow them to actually emit more greenhouse gases and still call it a “cut.” Woohoo?

Concern about global climate change isn’t actually doing much yet to forestall disaster:

Remember global warming? It seems like only yesterday that we were watching bits of Antarctica flake off into the ocean — not to mention even less-gripping sights, like Al Gore with a laser pointer — and worrying whether humanity’s love of SUVs and air conditioning was going to doom us to extinction by midcentury… [read more]

So the reports by CNN’s Gary Tuchman of serious flooding in the Lower 9th Ward – as well as his later report that the police were telling anyone in the area that the levees there could “explode at any time” – turned out to be inaccurate: Some water did overtop the levees there, but it looks as if the levees held firm. Of course, it took hours before viewers could be assured of this, as CNN’s (and other stations’) reporters otherwise stayed out of New Orleans’ low-lying neighborhoods, relying solely on Army Corps of Engineers assurances that the levees were holding. Which turned out to be true this time, but if it hadn’t been, who would have known?

In all, the Gustav reporting was a notch better than that during Katrina (at least someone bothered to train cameras on some levees), but still exhibited the focus on the tourist district and reliance on official sources that plagued coverage three years ago, at least until one NBC cameraman thought to walk the few blocks to the Convention Center. For example, while disgraced former FEMA chief Mike Brown has been interviewed on nearly every news station about the Gustav response, I’ve yet to see any interviews with New Orleanians who were evacuated on the buses that, this time, the government provided for people with no means of getting out of harm’s way. (Though Anderson Cooper’s blog does have a brief item about one evacuee shelter with no working plumbing.) If nothing else, asking evacuees whether they knew of people who’d been forced to stay behind in New Orleans would have helped answer the question of whether official claims that only 10,000 people remained in the city were true – something no station attempted to verify.

Anyway, looks like there will be two more opportunities coming up for the news media to work on their coverage. We’ll see how they do.

With Anderson Cooper momentarily off the air (he’s moving his satellite truck so it doesn’t blow over), CNN has turned to Gary Tuchman, who’s finally made it to the Lower 9th Ward. There, he reports, a “deluge of water” is pouring in “over and through” the levee, and stop signs are already underwater. Tuchman promised camera footage to come.

So kudos to CNN for getting somebody out into the neighborhoods this time. Though they’d get more kudos if Tuchman hadn’t been standing next to Cooper in the French Quarter an hour ago, talking about how it looked like New Orleans would be spared flooding this time.

Best unintentionally funny moment of the Gustav reporting so far: Anderson Cooper, standing in the official reporting zone of the French Quarter, assuring viewers that “You don’t see anyone on the streets here except police and emergency personnel – anyone still in town is hunkered down.” At that very moment, four twentysomething guys in street clothes wandered through the shot behind him, waving their arms in the hurricane-force winds.

I figure another ten minutes before it ends up on YouTube.

Flipping cable channels for the latest on Hurricane Gustav, I can’t help notice a striking similarity to the run-up to Hurricane Katrina three years ago: Every single news station is reporting from the French Quarter, or the adjacent downtown region. Even Anderson Cooper, the supposed hero journalist of Katrina, remarked a bit ago that while city officials say the city is mostly evacuated, he has no way of knowing if it’s true.

Is it really too much to expect that, now that Katrina alerted the nation that parts of New Orleans exist outside the tourist districts, the media actually go report from there to see how folks are handling this new threat? Probably yes – after all, a mere six months after Katrina, the vast majority of the reporting was on how Mardi Gras had returned to normal, and never mind that the rest of the city was a disaster, and tens of thousands of people were still displaced.

I did just see one CNN correspondent – I didn’t catch his name – mention to Cooper that while the tourist areas of New Orleans are in reasonably good shape today, the outlying neighborhoods are not. Still, I haven’t seen a single piece of video footage, or even blog post, from the poorer sections of town. Let’s hope we don’t have a repeat of 2005, when the nation went to bed on Monday night assured that “the water is going down” in the French Quarter, only to later learn that at moment, the levees had been breached for more than 12 hours, and half the city – the not-ready-for-prime-time half – was already underwater.