A graphic every editor should tape to her laptop

Bill Kovarik, professor of communications at Radford University in Virginia, found that the four U.S. newspapers with the largest circulation—The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times and the Washington Post—published 1,770 stories on climate change last year. That was about 10 percent higher than in 2011. But it was 11 percent below what the four papers published on the topic in 2010. And it was still far from what could be considered adequate.

The best of the lot was The New York Times:



Glenn Kramon, assistant managing editor of the Times attributed last year's uptick in the paper's coverage to the fruition of a 4-year-old effort to group top reporters on a separate environment desk. The paper has six reporters in the cluster, plus others covering the subject from other desks, as well as several editors—in particular the environment editor, Sandy Keenan – who all are "very comfortable" with the topic, he said.

Ironically, just a few days after Kramon was quoted in the matter in January, the Times dumped its environment desk and eliminated the position of environment editor and deputy environment editor, and reassigned all the staffers on the environment team to other desks. The paper's assistant managing editor said the move would not reduce coverage of climate change.

Perhaps. But that has certainly not been the experience in the past.

In 1990, when the 20th anniversary of Earth Day revived that project in the wake of the publication of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, scores of newspapers across the United States and in some foreign nations added reporters, editors, pages and sometimes entire weekly sections dedicated to environmental coverage. But over the next decade, nearly all of them retreated. Eco-coverage fell off sharply.

If you look for it, you can find plenty of climate-change coverage for the layman on the internet. Good, original reporting like that of Pulitzer prize-winning InsideClimateChange, ClimateProgress is plentiful. There are aggregators like The Daily Climate and Climate Debate Daily. Blogs like DeSmogBlog and more technically oriented sites like RealClimate also cover the field.

But most people don't get their news from those sites, even the ones with relatively high traffic. They get it from television or, in ever smaller numbers, from newspapers. Increasing coverage in those venues, by petitioning or other pressure, is a worthy project.

Two problems, however.

First, much of that coverage is tainted by 20 years of fossil-fueled lies and smears promoted by deniers and "skeptics." So it's not just a matter of increasing the coverage, but vastly improving it.

Second, given its penchant for disaster coverage of any kind, much of any increased climate change coverage can be expected to focus on news that generate despair because the impacts are so great and accelerating. As we know too well, despair creates apathy, and apathy kills activism.

Thus, pressure for increased coverage needs to be combined with pressure for solutions-based coverage. There's plenty of news to fulfill that need, but media ownership blocks much of it from getting regular attention. Making inroads against that requires ramping up action well beyond petition drives.