Jan 27 2009

Even-Handed to a Fault?

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Many environmentalists would give the Bush administration an "F" for inaction on the single greatest challenge facing humanity: global climate change. Now a celebrated reporter and editor, Eric Pooley, has given his profession only slightly better marks for its handling of the single biggest story of our time.

In a new essay on "The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change," Pooley, an award-winning former editor at Fortune, Time, and New York magazines, claims that too many reporters have muddled their coverage of the debate over what to do about climate change.

Just as the media once gave equal time to global warming deniers, Pooley complains, now they give unjustified attention to critics who make thinly supported claims that programs to address greenhouse gas emissions would cost millions of jobs and cripple the economy.

"Reporters tend to assign equal weight to two sides of an argument even if the two sides aren't equivalent," Pooley observes. "To give their stories drama and a feeling of balance, they seek opposing views even if the majority of experts agree and the dissenters lack credibility."

Pooley makes the same point about coverage of global warming that many media critics made about coverage of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction": most journalists prefer to play it safe as stenographers, dutifully reporting official claims, rather than investigating for themselves and drawing informed conclusions. As Pooley puts it:

Being a referee is harder than being a stenographer because it requires grappling with the substance of an issue in a way that many time-pressed journalists aren't willing or able to do. By stating conclusions rather than merely hinting at them, referees can make themselves targets, open to attack from aggrieved combatants; some reporters and news organizations aren't comfortable with that. . . . . But in an era when journalism is in danger of being marginalized by the commodification of news . . . survival requires taking risks and adding real value. Doubling down on serious work--by making complex issues understandable and even compelling, by offering honest judgment along with clear supporting evidence--is the best recipe for continued relevance.

Pooley singles out for praise Deirdre Shesgreen of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, who reported both sides of last year's Senate debate over the impact of a cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gas emissions, but then sought an expert independent assessment from Professor Robert N. Stavins, director of Harvard's Environmental Economics Program:

The cost of enacting a cap-and-trade system..."is not going to be free, it's not going to be a job-creation strategy," Stavins said. At the same time, "it's not going to bankrupt the economy or send the economy into a recession." The effect on gas prices, for example, will be "very small" compared to the recent run-up caused by changes in global supply and demand, Stavins said. Then there's the cost of not doing anything about global warming, which proponents of the Senate bill argued could be much higher than the cost of any new regulations. And perhaps more unpredictable, too.

Interestingly, Stavins' assessment finds strong suport from a new report by McKinsey & Co., the noted management consulting firm. It concludes that the cost of curbing greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming could cost as little as one percent of global GDP by 2030.

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