How to Fail at Climate Change Journalism

When does reporting on climate change become reporting fail?

When The Washington Post, one of the nation's most important national newspapers, leaves off sifting for useful facts and dialogue on climate change, in favor of republishing a lot of lowest common denominator yammer.

This is what veteran reporter Doug Feaver did when he lifted around two dozen reader responses to a story, published in yesterday's print and online editions, about how environmentalists are coping with oil lobby tactics for defeating climate policy reform this year. The article focused in particular on the lobbies' efforts to fend off establishment of a carbon dioxide emissions cap, as well as a market for trading carbon emissions credits -- both included in the House-passed climate and energy bill.

As the Senate prepares to take up its versions of the House bill, reporter David Fahrenthold writes, oil and coal lobbies are organizing astroturf rallies. They're also running TV ad blitzkrieg campaigns in the Mountain West, the region that's home to several crucial Senate swing votes.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, are staying largely inside the Beltway, and in his analysis "are struggling in a fight they have spent years setting up."

[Environmentalists] are making slow progress adapting a movement built for other goals -- building alarm over climate change, encouraging people to "green" their lives -- into a political hammer, pushing a complex proposal the last mile through a skeptical Senate.

Even now, these groups differ on whether to scare the public with predictions of heat waves or woo it with promises of green jobs. And they are facing an opposition with tycoon money and a gift for political stagecraft.

"Progressives and clean-energy types . . . made a mistake and slacked off" after the House of Representatives passed its version of a climate-change bill in June, said Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who blogs on climate issues. "And the other side really kept making its case."

[Then again]..."People have been naysaying all year long," said Josh Dorner of the Sierra Club. But, he said, "We got a bill through the House, and you know . . . all signs point to yes" in the Senate.

That's not to say it's a level playing field: climate change activists are by and large not sitting on the giant pools of money available to fossil energy lobbyists and campaign operatives.

Still, this is a provocative and useful bit of reporting. My own professional observations often support it: When it comes to a substantial "national dialogue" on energy policy and climate change action, I still hear crickets chirping.

So all that said, The Post could have grabbed the opportunity of its online-only follow-up to facilitate the real conversations the nation needs to be having: As Grist managing editor Russ Walker (who, full disclosure, is sometimes my editor on Grist assignments) says in the second round of comments (the comments to the comments, as it were):

There's plenty of room to debate the appropriate response to the scientific fact of global climate change. Should the U.S. have a carbon tax instead of a complicated cap-and-trade program? Should nuclear energy be embraced as a zero-carbon alternative to coal and oil? Should Congress allow more natural gas development in pristine parts of Alaska and the American West?

These are important discussions to have. But debating the science of climate change is like debating weekend chores with the wife: As much as you don't like it, those chores are a fact about which you have no choice.

...By all means, let's debate how best to cut our use of carbon fuels. But let's stop tilting at windmills by denying that there's a real problem.

These are the conversations being drowned out by the financial might of the fossil energy lobbies, as The Post's own reporter notes. And by facilitating one more he-said, she-said yelling match, featuring those who deny the reality of climate change, The Post gives a gloss of legitimacy to their demonstrably untrue arguments.

A useful window into the impoverished state of the national conversation on climate change? Maybe, if the paper had made that point directly.

Without that, it's the journalistic equivalent of a Potemkin village -- a fake settlement set up to impress outsiders with one's might and wealth.

Here, the fakery is that under the guise of promoting "reader participation" in a productive discussion of climate policy, as well as doing something usefully provocative with online media tools, The Washington Post is simply sponsoring a good old-fashioned flame war.