Kendall Hutt
AUCKLAND (Asia Pacific Report/ Pacific Media Watch): A worldwide call has gone out by academics and journalists for news media to change its approach on reporting climate change.
Current coverage of climate change leaves the public ill-informed on the issue and largely cynical, say some academics.
Also of concern is a tendency for media to frame climate change as an international rather than local issue, which leads it to be defined as a problem for others and not one of national sovereignty.
The need for improvement was highlighted at a recent public talk delivered at Auckland University of Technology in which Professor Robert Hackett of Simon Fraser University discussed whether certain “touchstones” of journalism, such as objectivity and the public sphere, apply in covering what he dubbed a “climate crisis”.
Alternative reporting
The topic of a forthcoming book with several colleagues titled Journalisms for Climate Crisis, Hackett proposes several alternative reporting models that could potentially allow greater, more in-depth coverage of the climate change issue.
However, Dr Hackett concluded his talk by stating structured media reform was needed for climate crisis journalism to flourish.
He stressed that the industry needs space to discuss such reform in order to foster change in defiance of a lack of political will.
Speaking with Asia Pacific Report, Dr Hackett has expanded on this conclusion, saying such structural media reform would “encourage and expand better journalism practices and coverage to the scale that is needed in a situation of global crisis”.
He added media reform would also reduce commercial pressures on journalists to generate clickbait and reduce concentrated corporate ownership.
But this is not a view shared by others.
Read the full article with responses by other climate change specialists, including the Pacific Media Centre's doctoral candidate on climate change in Melanesia and the media, Taberannang Korauaba - who would like to see more positive reporting about adaptation - in Asia Pacific Report.
Kendall Hutt is a graduate journalist from AUT University, currently completing her Honours year in Communication Studies. She is on the Pacific Media Centre’s Asia Pacific Journalism course.
Call for new media strategies in climate change reporting
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