Media and the Responsibility of Reporting

• Have public media and journalists contributed to confusion and doubt about climate change? What can/should they do to present science and scientific debate accurately on this topic?

Public media and journalists, in their effort to provide “fair and equal coverage” of issues such as global climate change and acid rain, have ultimately distributed mass amounts of misinformation about critical environmental issues. In Merchants of Doubt, Oreskes and Conway investigated the sources of this dubiousness and narrowed it down to two main sources: influential conservative think-tanks and the inability of journalists and major media sources to circulate the consensus of the scientific community to the general public. The latter source, to me, is the most disturbing. Despite concurrence throughout nearly the entire scientific community as well as several international conferences and four IPCC reports, journalists continued to project upon the public that no agreement has yet been reached.

The irresponsibility of news sources that distributed the “disagreement” is, in my opinion, nearly criminal. The role of scientists and the scientific community should be to objectively examine a problem and come to the best conclusion based on the available resources. The role of journalists, on the other hand, should be to report the consensus of the scientific community. The public has a great trust that news outlets are providing accurate, up-to-date information and the violation of this trust, such as the global climate change, the correlation between smoking and lung cancer, and acid rain “debates,” is a faulty business practice and unjust.

There is, however, a way to correct this perversion of truth. Media sources must assume their duty of reporting facts rather than presenting controversial editorials. Journalists should attend the conferences and read the scientific documents and from those sources write their articles. Converting the jargon-filled reports into a more easily read diction is the job of journalism. Just as sports writers inform the public of the inside events of the athletic community, scientific journalists should summarize the proceedings of the scientific community.