Examining “Balance as Bias”

Recently, Max Boykoff co-published some findings on global warming and the media that have gotten a lot of attention. Max is a doctoral candidate at the University of California–Santa Cruz, as well as director of a non-profit group called Duyure Adelante. His recent paper reported on in the L.A. Times, Nature, on National Public Radio, and other outlets, looks at the ways in which mainstream coverage of global warming in the media has actually distorted the facts of the issue, possibly influencing U.S. attitudes and policies toward it.

We at CA-CP first met Max in July 2003, when he traveled across the country to take part in the Global Warming Speaking and Organizing Training in Boston that we co-host annually with MCAN and GHN. We decided it was time to catch up with Max and talk with him about his new article, “Balance as Bias.” Here’s what he had to say:

CA- CP: Just to begin, can you give us some background on how you came to do your study on media and global warming?

Max: I’m drawn to issue of global warming because it is not just an environmental one: It permeates all aspects of our lives, threatening the stability of economic, political and social systems upon which we base our livelihoods and our well-being. My earlier background in psychology lends perspective - as do many other disciplines –as to how we might grapple with this inherently interdisciplinary issue.

My current research is part of my larger doctoral dissertation project in Environmental Studies here at the University of California-Santa Cruz, in which I investigate how U.S. mass media frames and influences science and policy climate-change discourse, and I examine their relations to public understanding here in the United States. Overall, I hope that my research can excavate linkages and ruptures in discourse and action, improving the connection between science, policy and civil society in order to address global climate change.

The particular paper that was just published in Global Environmental Change (GEC) comes out of a series of conversations with my brother Jules Boykoff – who is the co-author on the paper – regarding intersections between each of our own interests and research. Jules is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Politics at Whitman College in Washington State, and he recently finished his dissertation at American University. His research examined the demonization of foreign leaders and how it intersects with suppression of U.S. social movements of dissent. Part of his dissertation examined the role of the media in shaping and framing this contested terrain.

So through our shared interest in media studies, we assembled this paper on framing of human contributions to climate change in the prestige press – meaning the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal.

CA-CP: So what did you find?

Max: Overall, quantitative content analyses showed that, from 1990 through the end of our study in 2002, U.S. prestige-press coverage of human contributions to global warming was significantly different from the general consensus view in the climate science community on humans’ role in warming.

By this ‘general consensus’ in the scientific community, we mean the view that has been consistently communicated by various climate research groups, most clearly represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This UN group is comprised of top climate scientists from around the world, and they are engaged in a rigorous peer-review process to assemble reports that indicate the general view of the scientific community.

So our research took U.S. media coverage of this consensus view – which has had participation from over 2,500 top climate scientists over the years – and compared it to concurrent U.S. media coverage of people who dispute humans’ role in global warming (a.k.a. “climate skeptics”). We focused in on the journalistic norm of “balance” (meaning “roughly equal coverage of both sides”). In fact, through our analyses, the norm of balance was found to have skewed coverage.

Our paper title “Bias as Balance” attempts to indicate this. However, I would like to point out that when we refer to bias, we do not mean ideological bias – whether coverage is politically liberal or conservative. Rather, we focused on informational bias, which equates loosely with information distortion. While the former – ideological bias - may be inherently irresolvable, informational bias can be effectively examined via the tools of content analysis.

The content analysis that we used tried to steer clear of many of the pitfalls that plague
a number of previous content analyses of the news media. We didn’t simply tally up comments as numbers; rather, when coding we took careful notice of who was saying what, while simultaneously noting the way they said it.

CA-CP: It seems that a lot of finger-pointing could come out of your work. What do you want people to walk away with?

Max: This critique is not meant to be an attack on individual journalists; rather, we are concerned with the institutional features of the mass media systems, such as commonly employed journalistic tendencies like “balance.” Of course, there still remains some tension here, as journalists are contributing to those tendencies and consequent institutional conventions.

In this study, one thing we did not do was document which journalists have a careful understanding of the various facets of climate change – called specialists, likely science journalists – and those without such understanding – called generalists. Our hunch is that those trained in the sciences would be less likely to distort this information on humans’ role in climate change coming from science, while generalists may be more likely to rely on professional journalism norms such as ‘balance’ when they aren’t as well-informed on the issue.

Climate change is an interesting and important topic, as it permeates all aspects of our lives, from economics to politics to culture to society. Consequently, stories on it show up in all parts of the newspaper and are written by journalists with vastly different training. For example, in our sample alone (18.4% of the total articles), 15 different reporters covered stories on global warming in the Los Angeles Times from 2000-2002. So while there are science journalists that have done an excellent job covering humans’ role in global warming – for example Andrew Revkin of the New York Times – the many others covering it have much room for improvement. Overall, our study found that about 53% of stories were what could be considered “balanced” reporting, while about 35% of the stories were found to have appropriately reported the general scientific consensus on humans’ role in global warming. These percentages could be seen both as encouraging and discouraging, depending on one’s point of view.

CA-CP: This may be beyond the scope of your study – but what do you see as opportunities to address what sounds like a pretty systemic problem?

Max: There are a number of important factors involved here. Some could be considered at the individual level: journalists could more effectively report this scientific view through better contextualization and improved labeling of those quoted – from scientists, to industry spokespeople to politicians to lobbyists; readers/citizens could be better informed on the issue to understand this scientific consensus and demand more accurate coverage; and scientists could reach out more consistently to media and the public to improve communications of their and their colleague’s research.

However, it is important to recognize that many of the challenges that arise in this media-science-policy discussion are much bigger than this level of individual reform. In the capitalist society where we live our everyday lives, there are undoubtedly important and overarching political economic considerations intertwined here as well. As a few examples, over the years greater pressures to meet deadlines have forced journalists to produce stories quickly and further mass media conglomeration and mergers have had multifarious impacts – few positive – on the quality of reporting.

So ultimately, it is a tremendously complex issue, and finger-pointing will only get the discussion so far….so rather than simply doing that it has been our hope that this research can continue to move discussions on climate change coverage in the media along in productive ways.

CA-CP: Just in the past two months, global warming has been getting major play in some big outlets (National Geographic, Business Week, Fortune). Do you see any of the institutional forces you’ve just discussed shifting to allow these publications to cover global warming as less of a controversy and more of a given, or what do you theorize is going on?

Max: Unfortunately, I don’t think that this recent upswing in coverage is a sign that global warming is any less of a controversy. When discussing global warming, one inevitably calls into question carbon-based activities that emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and this gets to the drivers, you might say, of our present industry and society.

I believe that this coverage comes from key editors and citizens that have seen enough signs themselves to risk entering into the “controversy.” As an example, Bill Allen – chief editor of National Geographic – said in the introduction to the issue on global warming that he anticipated he would lose some subscriptions due to entering into this controversy. But he has clearly indicated that climate change is important enough even for a traditionally cautious magazine like National Geographic to “stir the pot” for further discussion and action.

This is not to say that this controversy is given or natural. As has been revealed in various investigative stories over the years, the sources fueling such controversy can be manufactured by carbon-based industry groups themselves. For example, John Cushman revealed in the New York Times that in 1998 a draft report of a proposal compiled by industry opponents of action regarding global warming was leaked to the press. Among the ideas in the proposal was a “campaign to recruit a cadre of scientists who share the industry’s views of climate science and to train them in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify.” Moreover, the plan would measure success “by counting, among other things, the percentage of news articles that raise questions about climate science and the number of radio talk show appearances by scientists questioning the prevailing views.” This plan proposed a media-relations budget of $600,000 that “would be directed at science writers, editors, columnists and televisions network correspondents, using as many as twenty ‘respected climate scientists’ recruited expressly to inject credible science and scientific accountability into the global climate debate, thereby raising questions about and undercutting the ‘prevailing scientific wisdom.’” The informal group that assembled this report – from big oil companies, conservative policy research organizations and trade associations – met in the American Petroleum Institute’s Washington office.

In the case of this paper we just published in GEC, once it began receiving more media attention from outlets like Nature, the Los Angeles Times and Grist, a person by the name of Frank Maisano – strategic communications director and oil lobbyist with Bracewell & Patterson law firm – circulated a statement calling our peer reviewed study ‘outrageous’ without critiquing any of the specifics of it. Bracewell & Patterson has received almost $5 million for lobbying by the oil and gas industry since 1998, and Mr. Maisano is a former spokesperson for the Global Climate Coalition, which was a carbon-based industry-funded group very active in the 1990s, working to downplay the more general threat of climate change.

However, I am hopeful that amid these struggles public and policy-maker understanding can improve and policy actions can continue to be implemented to combat human contributions to global warming. There are a number of activities from both directly within policy circles – such as the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act and the recent California law capping CO2 emissions in personal vehicles – and from grassroots citizen action groups such as Greenhouse Network and Clean Air-Cool Planet (as well as the linkages between them) that give rise to hope for positive changes.

CA-CP: The Bush administration recently released a report officially acknowledging human influence as a significant contributor to climate disruption; yet their policies have not changed accordingly (at least not yet). What do you see as the connection between identifying the problem and fixing the problem?

Max: This is another interesting and recent example of contradictions within science-policy discourse and disconnects from action. However, it also could simply be some posturing in the few remaining weeks before the 2004 U.S. presidential election due to President Bush’s weak environmental track record to date. As this Administration (and others) have demonstrated, there can be a vast gulf between rhetoric and action. Since George H.W. Bush pledged in his 1988 presidential campaign to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect”, many have argued that promises like these have been drowned in a swirling pool of contradictory phraseology and insufficient actions. Despite the fact that the U.S. has spent $18 billion on climate research since 1990 – three times as much as any other country, and more than Japan and all 15 nations of the EU combined – calls for further research has served to create appearances of action. Until the Bush Administration (or possibly the Kerry Administration) takes concrete action – such as moving [the] Kyoto [Protocol] to the U.S. Congress and pushing for ratification – I feel that such reports and consequent comments from the federal administration must be met with cautious enthusiasm and a critical eye.

While climate science is carried out by the widely accepted scientific method, climate science policy is another matter. Well-known Stanford University Professor Stephen Schneider has said, “I don’t believe in doing science by consensus. But I do believe consensus is the best way to approach science policy.” The UN and WMO-sponsored IPCC must agree as they too rely upon consensus-driven processes. If science becomes seen as less objective and more passionate, I think this can only be good for better linkages between science and policy. Objectivity is one of the sanctified yet illusory goals in our society; greater recognition that everything is permeated by subjectivity and politics can improve our understanding and participation in not only climate science and policy but many other key scientific questions.

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Check out “Balance as Bias” in the journal Global Environmental Change.

Max Boykoff is pursuing his Ph.D. in Environmental Studies and a parenthetical degree in Sociology from the UC-Santa Cruz. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Ohio State University. Max directs ‘Duyure Adelante,’ which works in Central America on various projects ranging from local level climate change mitigation and adaptation activities to scholarships for youth to continue schooling. After finishing his dissertation, he plans to teach at a university while maintaining involvement with climate-change policy action and activist pursuits. Max lives in California with his wife Monica and 2-year-old son Elijah; they are expecting another child in March 2005.