Bad News Sells Papers!

Ok, so we have all been told not to believe everything we read in the newspapers, but just how accurate are the UK news reports on Climate change? There seems to have been a big increase in the coverage of climate change, this is most likely due to many events that have happened over the past 8 years. Such as the G8 meeting at Gleneagles, the release of Al Gore’s film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and the release of the Stern Review. From week to week we see various reports on climate change in both the UK tabloids and broadsheets. It can be very difficult to decide which of these reports is fact or fiction, especially if you do not really understand what you are reading about. I believe it also depends on which type of paper you have brought. It would appear to me that broadsheet papers are aimed at an academic market and can often contain lots of scientific facts and research, making them more reliable than tabloid papers.

Tabloid papers on the other hand appear to aim themselves at the working class reader and although they are looking at similar aspects of climate change they tend not to be quite as scientific. They seem to rely on satire and much more accessible language to sell their papers and make them easier to read and understand. This has consequences though, as on many occasions papers such as The Sun and The Mirror have been said to be contributing to ‘climate complacency’ and misrepresenting climate change in some of the UK’s most widely read papers. Some research carried out by the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute found out that about a quarter of coverage in four UK tabloids from 2000 through to 2006 misrepresented ‘wide scientific agreement’ about Green House Gases having a large role in global warming.

News papers say they are just trying to cover a crucial area, but all I can see they are doing is scaremongering and making issues out to be far more devastating than they perhaps are. This in turn is leaving people feeling helpless against the fight of climate change. If you look at the tabloids such as the Daily Mail or the Sun you would be likely to spend longer looking for an article involving climate change than what you would if you looked at a Broadsheet like The Independent or The Guardian.

More often than not at the present the issues surrounding climate change relate back to sustainable development. No matter whether the article is about ecological issues or cultural and social problems involving climate change it always seems to be linked with sustainable development. An article in The Independent recently looked slashing the University of East Anglia’s carbon emissions. This Norwich based University is diving in to an £8million project to help it become the most sustainable campus in the country. They are going to have a biomass power station built on campus which will be powered using locally-sourced woodchips. Hopes are that it will reduce the Universities carbon emissions by up to a third after 2 years, making the University much more sustainable. More and more newspapers are looking at similar issues, where by reducing problems such as CO2 emissions we can start taking more action to help our planet and work towards a more sustainable future.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/power-station-to-slash-university-of-east-anglias-carbon-emissions-969244.html