{"id":495,"date":"2013-04-05T09:55:01","date_gmt":"2013-04-05T16:55:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/newjournalism\/?page_id=495"},"modified":"2016-08-27T09:26:27","modified_gmt":"2016-08-27T16:26:27","slug":"mckibben","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/newjournalism\/mckibben\/","title":{"rendered":"Is covering climate change going to be ultimate test of the value of journalism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Bill McKibben speaking at JTM-Denver (Photo by Tom Yulsman)<\/p><\/div>\n

This story reports on a 40-minute speech\u00a0 by environmental activist and journalist Bill McKibben at a conference, \u201cJournalism is Dead; Long Live Journalism<\/a>,\u201d organized by Journalism That Matters, and following his receipt on Aprl 3, 2013 of the \u201cAnvil of Freedom\u201d award from the\u00a0Edward W. Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media<\/a>\u00a0at the University of Denver. \u00a0 The full transcription of his speech may be downloaded as a PDF from HERE<\/a> and an MP3 podcast of the talk is HERE.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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By Bill Densmore<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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(Watch archived video<\/a> of McKibben’s speech. The first nine minutes has no audio; McKibben begins speaking at 11:30 into the video)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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Before he wrote in 1989 the first and most famous popular book about climate change,\u00a0<\/span>The End of Nature<\/i><\/a>,\u00a0 Bill McKibben considered himself \u201ca good journalist, and nothing more, for awhile.\u201d But now the climate-change activist, founder of 350.org<\/a>, is challenging fellow journalists \u2013 he still believes he is one \u2013 to see climate-change reporting as the ultimate test of journalism\u2019s value.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI long ago concluded, and in fact I concluded when I wrote\u00a0The End of Nature<\/i>\u00a0that I was no longer in the sense that I was used to thinking about it, an \u2018objective journalist,\u2019 \u201d\u00a0 McKibben said in a 40-minute speech April 3 at the University of Denver.\u00a0 \u201cI knew that I didn\u2019t want the planet to heat up. I had taken sides in this, OK?\u00a0 . . . But it doesn\u2019t mean that I\u2019m not a journalist anymore and completely capable of uncovering new stuff and spreading it out and getting it around and then going in and trying to make it count for something, too, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n

McKibben was speaking to about 100 people after receiving the annual \u201cAnvil of Freedom\u201d award from the Estlow Center for Journalism and New Media, at the university. His talk came at the midpoint of a conference organized by the non-profit group Journalism That Matters, entitled: \u201cJournalism Is Dead; Long Live Journalism.\u201d\u00a0 McKibben said climate change will give mankind the opportunity find out whether big brains were a good or bad evolutionary adaptation \u2013 as we see how governments and societies deal with the peril.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll also find out whether the journalistic method was a good idea or not \u2013 whether it really works or not,\u201d said McKibben. \u201cWhether it serves the early-warning function we need it to serve or not. In the same way that we found out about how good our military was when it was time to fight World War II. Now we\u2019ll find out how good our journalism is because we\u2019re fighting a war for understand that the stakes and the scale and the pace are absolutely crucial. And those are things we haven\u2019t gotten across and we do have to figure out how to get across.\u201d<\/p>\n

McKibben said three numbers \u2013 temperature rise, atmospheric carbon and claimed fossil-fuel reserves — prove we have left the 10,000-year Holocene period of geologic history and benign climate stability that underwrote the risk of human civilization.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s by far the biggest story and yet in real terms people don\u2019t know it, don\u2019t understand it, don\u2019t get it,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cSomehow, that marks a failure, well, of many things. It\u2019s a great failure of our political system, which I will get to as well. But it is also a great failure of journalists.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it is probably the single biggest example of a story that, well, we haven\u2019t managed to get right for all kinds of interesting reasons,\u201d McKibben said.\u00a0 As he turned his magazine pieces in\u00a0The New Yorker<\/i>\u00a0into a book, recalled McKibben, \u201cI wasn\u2019t really an environmentalist then. I was mostly a journalist. And I understood, quickly, that this was the most interesting story that there was in the world that this was literally the biggest thing that human beings had ever contemplated doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

While climate change as a phenomenon moves far slowly that most stories journalists are used to covering, he says the Earth is now warming 50 times faster than at any point during the Holocene. It moves extraordinarily fast in geological time.\u00a0 That calls for journalists to consider to consider its significance to be as newsworthy as its speed, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf our job is to tell people about the most important things that are happening in our world so they can act on them, it\u2019s pretty clear that it has been more failure than success. And on an issue with stakes higher than we\u2019ve every faced before. We\u2019re sleep walking off the edge of a cliff, and our early-warning system, which is journalism, has largely failed to alert us to that in ways that matter.\u00a0 Which is not to say there hasn\u2019t been a lot of good journalism done \u2013 there has \u2013 and I could spent the whole time listing people now who\u2019ve written great books and gret articles, but it hasn\u2019t broken through in the ways that it needs to.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The \u201che-said-she-said approach\u201d doesn\u2019t work very well with science because once scientists have reached a working consensus on something, that actually is what you would want to get across, not that there is some very small group who remain doubting, said McKibben.<\/p>\n

Nothing excuses failure to get basic facts to public<\/h2>\n

It is the reality of changes in weather itself, rather than journalism, that has raised awareness of climate change, said McKibben. He said approximately 80 percent of U.S. counties have had a federally declared weather-related disaster in the last two years. \u201cAt a certain point,\u201d he said, \u201cPeople just look out the door and understand what\u2019s going on. Or they look at the things that now we have no choice but to cover and cover intensely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last year, McKibben\u2019s article in\u00a0Rolling Stone<\/i>\u00a0magazine entitled \u201cThe Terrifying New Math of Climate Change,\u201d<\/a> garnered three million \u201cLike\u201d on Facebook, he said, surpassing by far the reaction to the cover-story in the magazine\u2019s issue that month \u2013 a profile of celebrity Justin Bieber.<\/p>\n

McKibben said he helped found the climate-action group 350.org <\/a>because that was the number in parts per million of carbon that can be safely sustained in Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\u00a0 He said there are three numbers of importance, the three numbers he laid out in his popular\u00a0Rolling Stone<\/i>\u00a0story.<\/p>\n