How Journalists Can Engage News Audiences on Climate Change
by Kamyar Razavi
A journalist, and PhD candidate studying the nexus between solutions journalism and climate communication
April 15, 2019
As most journalists know, engaging news audiences on climate change can be incredibly difficult. The planet faces an existential crisis from global warming, yet the scope of audience concern pales in comparison to the level of risk, as evidenced by credible surveys ranking climate change consistently far down the list of people’s priorities.
A host of psychological barriers — including the difficulty of seeing climate change in the here and now (though that’s changing), the ‘invisibleness’ of carbon in the atmosphere, and upfront costs of taking action — all work against capturing people’s imagination and generating engagement on climate change.
Journalism can play a crucial role in producing more audience engagement on global warming. Unfortunately, coverage of climate-related issues, at least on American television, has been going down, not up.
What’s behind the disconnect between the seriousness of the threat of climate change and the dearth of coverage? And how can righting the climate coverage ship generate news engagement for stories beyond climate change?
For years, journalists, along with scientists and politicians, have communicated messages about climate change based on the idea that people would take action if only they had more information about all the scary impacts of climate change.
However, more and more research in psychology and social science is showing that the relationship between how much people know about the science of climate change, and how concerned they are about the risks, is not always linear. It seems counterintuitive, but knowledge does not necessarily translate into more concern.
In other words, we can’t get people to ‘care’ about climate change by just shoveling facts at them about melting ice floes, dying polar bears or even sea level rise.
Trouble is, spelling out hard facts, and backing those facts up with experts, is precisely what journalists have long been trained to do. We’re supposed to lay out the information, and let the public reach its own conclusions based on the information we provide. That’s ‘objective’ journalism.
Journalistic objectivity demands that journalists emotionally ‘detach’ themselves from the story. Similarly, objectivity requires journalists to ‘balance’ a story by presenting ‘both sides.’
Let me explain why each of these approaches needs a rethink, if journalists want to create more engagement on climate (and on a whole host of other contentious subjects).
First, the idea of balancing ‘both sides’ of a story is a terrible proxy for objectivity, simply because one of the ‘two’ sides can be less true than the other (or, in the case of climate denialism, not true at all!). (There was a time, not long ago, when stories about climate change included obligatory perspectives from the skeptics).
Moreover, conflict almost always has multiple facets, entry and exit points. So the notion that news reports can whittle down a conflict into its ‘two sides’ is arbitrary, random, and in the case of facts that fly in the face of reason, patently absurd. For instance, it should be obvious that the Syrian civil war was not just a fight between Bashar Assad and the West, or the West and ISIS. But often, that complexity is missing.
Journalists also subscribe to the idea that they need to ‘detach’ themselves from the story. Detachment has been a standard feature of journalism instruction and practice for decades. It’s associated with reporting the world ‘as it is,’ but much like balance, the idea that journalists can be objective simply by separating their values from the facts is an arbitrary construct, borne out of efforts in the early 20th century to ‘professionalize’ the news.
It’s evident that everybody has values, including newsroom workers. So the idea that worldviews — shaped by education, relationships, community or political affiliations — would somehow not affect how journalists see and report the news doesn’t really add up.
Which is why it’s helpful to look at objectivity through a wider lens: not so much as mere detachment from the facts, but as a way of reporting on underlying reasons why things happen the way they do.
It’s through this wider lens of seeing the world that solutions to social problems, and the context behind those problems, have more of a fighting chance of getting picked up and reported on in a substantive way.
It’s easy to understand why news is so focused on all that is wrong: whether it’s politics or journalism, it’s far easier to capture an audience’s attention with stories or headlines that generate feelings of fear, anxiety or concern.
These emotions ignite humans’ survival instincts, and generate rapid ‘thought-action’ responses. But over the long term, negative emotions create burnout, narrowing people’s frames of reference, not to mention their cognitive ability to connect the dots, beyond the immediacy of the here and now.
In short, strategic reporting of negative news generates cynicism. Moreover, polarization and political apathy thrive when news audiences have trouble seeing the long road. And, as so much research over the past few years has shown, that’s a major problem for our democracy.
One way to counter this apathy is to cast a spotlight on ways out of conflict (instead of just dwelling on the conflict itself). Journalists can play a hugely important role in making solutions to social problems less of an afterthought and a more central part of the conversation.
Identifying solutions to intractable problems helps people see beyond their own frames of reference, to try and understand the logic of ‘the other side.’ That’s an important ‘glue’ for our democracy.
But reporting on how people are responding to problems does something else that’s really impactful too. It moves the conversation beyond our most basic instincts, to try nudge us into thinking more rationally. This approach can go a long way toward helping audiences (and journalists) think more critically about the world and, importantly, to equip us to reject misleading or outright false information by nudging us to think beyond fear and hopelessness (in short, to think more analytically).
Some would say journalism that identifies and talks about solutions amounts to ‘advocacy.’ But it needn’t be so. It’s entirely possible for reporters to report on things that work, based on evidence, or to even infuse their stories with ideas about what happens next — without resorting to direct advocacy.
Injecting complexity into conflict, or bringing the context into the foreground are hardly advocacy. Moreover, good journalism challenges reporters to ask their sources questions that tap into the reasons why they feel the way they do, and to nudge those sources to explain why they think those on the other side think the way they do.
It’s about facilitating informed debate through context and empathy. In short, this kind of journalism is about creating a connection to sources and to audiences through their emotions and values, not just by throwing facts at them.
When it comes to climate change, this more intuitive, values-driven approach to the news can have a powerful effect at creating engagement, particularly with segments of the population that are highly attuned to the urgency of mitigating climate change.
Specific ways to do this are through stories that emphasize actions people can take or that showcase examples of individuals making a difference.
There is no denying that climate change is a devilishly difficult problem to wrap our heads around. However, if we can use journalism to constructively engage audiences on this subject, then there’s a good chance we can use journalism to engage audiences on almost anything.
And at a time when so much information is being weaponized for monetary or political gain, engaging with news audiences in a way that builds connections and trust couldn’t be more important.
