Climate change coverage at a crossroads in Australia

Conservative news outlets News Corp and Fairfax Media tend to control the message

Australia is entering what meteorologists are predicting will be another sweltering summer, with October already experiencing its hottest day on record.

But coverage of the record temperatures, which scientists agree can be traced to global warming, isnt always covered as such here. Australias concentrated media landscape, dominated by two owners that skew toward climate-change skepticism, has led to coverage that denies or minimizes the warming weather. Some media watchers hope that a host of new digital additions to the media scene will diversify rhetoric.

According to the United Nations, there is strong scientific consensus that the global climate is changing and that human activity contributes significantly to this trend. But last year, the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism found that a third of Australian newspapers rejected or cast doubt on climate change over a three-month period in both 2011 and 2012. In its analysis of 602 articles on climate change across 10 mastheads, the ACIJ found that 32 percent of the articles did not accept the scientific consensus. The report also found that most of the skepticism came from Rupert Murdochs News Corp.

All of which Adelaide Universitys Simon Divecha, who writes on climate change and Australian media for academic and research site The Conversation, sees as a failing of the Australian media industry.

At the time of the high heatwaves, it just wasnt getting reported, he said. The articles talking about the heat didnt connect it to climate change.

Part of the homogeneity lies with how concentrated print media is in Australia. According to The Conversation, among most influential metropolitan and national dailies, News Corp accounted for 65 percent of the circulation in 2011, while Fairfax Media, the second biggest publisher, which owns The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbournes The Age, controlled only 25 percent.

Murdochs Australian arm of News Corp controls 59 percent of all daily newspapers, with sales of 17.3 million papers a week, making it easily Australias most influential publisher.

Murdoch himself has often been critical of climate change, and earlier this year told Sky News Australia, which he partially owns, that we should approach climate change with great skepticism. News Corp likewise showed a similar tendency to cast doubt on whether humans are actually affecting the climate and whether climate change is happening.

Investigative journalist Wendy Bacon was the author behind the ACIJ report, titled, Sceptical Climate: Climate Science in Australian Newspapers. Bacon explored how climate change is covered through the amount of words dedicated to the topic and whether those pieces were news features or commentary.

Read more here:
Climate change coverage at a crossroads in Australia