There is a truth in the climate change debate that is so obvious that it barely requires stating – but I will anyway. Despite all of the efforts of the scientists, politicians and activists, the message taken on board by the hoi polloi will always be whatever the mainstream media decide it to be. Which, of course, means that the message will be under editorial control and will be finely honed to draw maximum attention to the message bearer; an attention that almost always serves both a commercial and a political goal. It is little wonder, therefore, that those on both sides of the argument will see the media as being dominated by the dark side, prostituted on behalf of an avaricious and misguided oligarchy. The only thing that really unifies the climate debate protagonists is that both camps are convinced that the media is working for the other side.
I’m not really here to settle that debate. As far as I am concerned the issue can remain forever moot. But what does concern me is the level of media attention that the subject receives nowadays. And the reason for my concern is something known as Bagdikian’s Law of Journalism:
“The accuracy of news reports of an event is inversely proportional to the number of reporters on the scene.”
The reasoning behind the law is quite simple: If the journalists have an agenda that goes beyond the accurate reporting of a simple truth, then one can only expect the accuracy to suffer under the burden of increased reportage. It’s quite a profound insight, and its expounding required an unusually profound journalist.
The patron saint of journalists
Consult any reasonably reliable tome on the subject and it will tell you that the patron saint of journalists is Francis de Sales, Bishop of Geneva (born 21 August 1567, died 28 December 1622). But I put it to you that there is a much worthier candidate for the position; one who could have expected to get the vote ahead of Francis were it not for one unfortunate detail – he just happens to be Jewish. His name was Ben-hur Haig Bagdikian, an Armenian Genocide survivor who went on to receive both the Peabody Award and the Pulitzer Prize during a glittering journalistic and academic career that spanned 43 years. Famed for his ethical standards and hailed by his professional colleagues as one of the finest journalist of the 20th century, he is perhaps best known for his Washington Post role in the exposure of the Pentagon Papers, and for his hugely influential 1983 book, The Media Monopoly. He was a highly opinionated and much quoted figure, but if his outlook could be captured in a single quote, it would be the advice that he would give to his students during his tenure as professor of journalism at UC Berkley:
“Never forget that your obligation is to the people. It is not, at heart, to those who pay you, or to your editor, or to your sources, or to your friends, or to the advancement of your career. It is to the public.”
Indeed, throughout his career it was the dangers associated with the corporate control of the media that troubled him most, though he did also take a sideswipe at those journalists who saw the media primarily as an opportunity to promote their celebrity status. Celebrity, he thought, was the worst thing that can happen to a journalist, since “The job of the celebrity is to be observed, to make sure others learn about him or her, to be the object of attention rather than an observer.”
Yes, if you want to find a man of integrity who was able to forge a hugely successful career in journalism whilst being its most outspoken critic, then you need look no further than our Benny.
The fear of missing out
Those of you who had hoped that this eulogy was leading up to the revelation that Bagdikian was a fervent climate change sceptic are, I’m afraid, in for a big disappointment. As far as I have been able to determine, Bagdikian never actually wrote anything on the subject. However, given his anti-capitalist credentials, his self-proclaimed advocacy for social justice, and the fact that in the 2000 US presidential election he endorsed the Green Party candidate, one would expect his views to have been somewhat sympathetic towards the alarmist agenda. He was not, I would venture, typical of your usual Cliscep reader. But that isn’t going to stop me from pointing out the importance of Bagdikian’s Law in relation to the question of climate change reporting – even though the law’s creator would probably not have seen the misreporting that I do.
In fact, apart from Covid’s recent hogging of the limelight, it is difficult to think of a subject that has attracted more media attention than climate change. And, courtesy of Bagdikian’s Law, there can therefore be no subject for which the accuracy of reporting could be more suspect. BBC specials have become so commonplace that the epithet ‘special’ no longer seems appropriate. The reporting of just about any event or proclamation is incomplete without a reference to how it relates to climate change. Even the adverts offer no respite. Just last night I was treated to what appeared to be a short documentary about the effects that humans are having on the environment, and what they are doing to combat them, only to be treated to the end-title revelation that all of those who were taking a stand for the environment were drinking Estrella. Yes, there is a better way – the Estrella way.
Be that as it may, as far as the media are concerned, the reality is that it isn’t so much a question of what you can do for climate change, as to what climate change can do for you. Newspapers such as the Guardian have long since abandoned any pretense of free-thinking journalism and I’m beginning to wonder if such newspapers have anyone on their payrolls who isn’t an environmental correspondent. I sometimes feel as though I am being carpet-bombed by a media that seems to be so thoroughly locked into the zeitgeist that I can only draw two conclusions: There is no longer any hope of a counter-message emerging, and there is no hope that the current message can be taken at face value.
Consensus is a fine thing, and it can often be guardedly used as a surrogate for certainty where science is concerned. But journalism doesn’t work that way. Bagdikian’s Law is a reminder that a tsunami of reporting will only drown the truth. And you needn’t take that from me. It’s coming from one of the world’s most prestigious journalists, Ben-hur Haig Bagdikian, born January 30, 1920, died March 11, 2016.
Climate Scepticism 
Brilliant. I feel I’m going to be arguing with you and Ben Hur for weeks about this.
First, it’s not the reporters on the scene who are the problem, but the commenters back in the office and the special effects bods in the studio. Attenborough was fine in the days when he reported face to face with something yucky in the undergrowth, but not so good when doing a gaga voice over to stuff that had been put together by a bunch of Welsh public relations freelancers under the auspices of a temp just down from Oxford who’d spent six months out of contact with the world looking for some non-existent bird on a Pacific island. That’s BBC science output nowadays, and the problem is not due to too many people at the climate coal face.
What made arguing with the likes of Monbiot fun, back in the heady days of free speech at the Graun, was the fact that his tortured view of the world was influenced by the fact that he had actually been there, experienced dangerous diseases, drought-stricken natives, and gunslinging dictatorships in hot climates, creating a fascinating tension between his fairyland climate beliefs and his knowledge that there’s a real world outside the Guardian headquarters in that weird Concrete Venetian playground behind Kings Cross. The messaging today has passed from the horny handed climate warriors of yore to Lord Deben and his minions. Click on any Green NGO and scroll down the “Who we are” tab to see who’s in charge now. The nearest thing to a climate catastrophe they’ve ever seen is a pie chart that won’t fit on the web page.
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Geoff,
You may find the following ‘Autobiographical Reflections’ of interest:
https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/ben-h-bagdikian/
They include a little bit of context for the formulation of his law:
“I soon left daily reporting in favor of political stories and years of stories from the Deep South for national magazines. My 13 years of covering civil rights and poverty in the Deep South were both rich and frustrating. I admired the courage of the oppressed people I came to know, moved by their private pride, integrity, and humor while struggling for survival and equality, and frustrated by a nation that kept them invisible.
These were years of explosive events in the postwar American South that attracted crowds of national reporters and network cameras, most of whom limited themselves mainly to physical melodrama and official statements of people with titles. I formed my Second Law of Journalism: the accuracy of news reports of an event is inversely proportional to the number of reporters on the scene.”
Of course, one can debate what ‘arriving at the scene’ means in the context of the climate change story, and I am mindful that I may be using the word ‘scene’ metaphorically in my article. The point is, I believe, that limiting oneself to the “melodrama and official statements of people with titles” is a common theme that one encounters when the journalistic circus comes into town.
Incidentally, the above reflections also confirm my suspicions regarding Bagdikian’s climate change beliefs:
“The planet is not yet safe. It suffers from the kind of greed that ignores not only global warming but an even more immediate bomb ready to detonate, the terrible gap on the globe between the rich and the poor…”
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“There is a truth in the climate change debate that is so obvious that it barely requires stating – but I will anyway. Despite all of the efforts of the scientists, politicians and activists, the message taken on board by the hoi polloi will always be whatever the mainstream media decide it to be.”
Actually, this is measurably not the case at all. Well, measurably assuming the approximation that ‘hoi polloi’ = public, despite some segments of the public no doubt consider themselves above the common herd. In all nations there is a very significant division between those who even in the presence of reality-constraints (e.g. competition from other policy issues) are still sympathetic to the dominant media message of climate catastrophe (and policy), and those who are not. This division is mobile depending upon the strength of the constraint, but at very high constraint, less than 10% of the public in any nation still express support for the dominant catastrophe narrative and its policy implications. Where there are no reality-constraints present, there are likewise significant divisions in all publics between those who are sympathetic to the dominant media message of climate catastrophe, and those who are not. But the pattern of division is completely different across nations than for the reality-constrained case, and can rise to about 65% support although only in very religious nations. This type of support in very irreligious nations, where in fact press dominance on the issue is greater, is much smaller. I can provide a chart if you wish.
This is still completely compatible with Bagdikian’s Law afaics. One merely has to take onboard that the journalists’ agenda in this case is aligned to the larger cultural agenda of climate catastrophism, which via interaction with the older culture of religion (any Faith), plus in the US political tribalism too, creates the above levels of simultaneous support and rejection per nation. And these levels are also very much the result of efforts by (most) politicians and all the activists, plus those scientists who have adopted the advocacy hat too, because ultimately they’re also working (albeit subconsciously) on behalf of the same cultural agenda as is the media. The fact that politicians pretty much never act against advocacy (e.g. XR) or the wildest media messages, but in fact accommodate and echo them in official forms, say this is no grass-roots movement against authority, it is a cultural movement against the (large swathes of) the public not yet captured, which movement has already captured most politicians / elite. Ultimately, the message from all these parties is the same; it differs only in nuance.
I think this is also compatible with a universal perception that ‘that the media is working for the other side’. Because cultures always have a jihadist wing who will vocally call-out any and every slightest hint of balance or (Gaia forbid) mere glimpse of a skeptical perspective. Whereas there is indeed constant carpet-bombing of the cultural position (the Estrella one bothered me too, it would probably cost about a million pounds a week or something to keep a few crews like that touring the oceans, hence a vanishing proportion of the population so engaged; one would think they’d like a larger market for their beer). However, cultures are polarising, so while I don’t know the figure, it’s quite possible that while saturation coverage recruits X thousand a day, it may well be creating 2X rejections per day too. For sure in any strong reality-constrained circumstance, supporters are a small minority. The main issue is exposing what the reality-constraints actually are; that which you don’t know about isn’t a constraint. For instance the UK public simply isn’t going to go for no gas boilers etc once they grasp the reality of what this really means to them. The way to go therefore is to expose the realities, which fortunately some mainstream media have started to do, e.g. The Telegraph. I think counter-messaging should forget about trying to debunk a religion (impossible in the eyes of believers anyhow) and simply concentrate, as did Planet of the Humans, on the ugly realities around everything it touches.
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Except that climate change is not an event. It’s more a speculative longterm research project, like the Quest for the Holy Grail, and, as in the Monty Python film, its reporting is nothing more than a series of inconsequential non-events, each one more absurd than the last.
But it’s when you look at real events – controversial ones, where accuracy of reporting is of profound importance – that the Law looks the most fragile.
Take the Skripal affair. A Russian spy being poisoned in a Salisbury park is a big news story, and the media were all over it. Since the big question was: “Did Putin do it?” pride of place in the media went, not to the hundreds of journalists interviewing witnesses and photographing park benches, but to the experts back in the studio. While many supported the official government line long before the government put it out, there were plenty who expressed doubts. I saw a retired Admiral on SkyNews pouring scorn on the idea that the Russians would do it, before being shut up by their top journalist woman (the one they sacked for partying during lockdown.) Here is matter for a Bagdikianian-type law – something on the lines of: “the solidity of a consensus view is inversely proportion to the quality of the evidence.”
The best source of information on the Skripal affair is neither the BBC nor Russia Times, but an obscure Christian blog http://www.theblogmire.com run by someone who lives in Salisbury and knows the shortest walk from a to b and how long it takes. And the best evidence that the official story is a load of borscht comes from the many reports by journalists from the local press and popular papers like the Sun and the Mirror, who, instead of pontificating on geopolitics, plodded round asking the locals questions, completely unaware that the innocent answers would blow the official story apart before the government had even formulated it.
Journalistic evidence on the spot is essential, because it’s collected before people have time to reflect on what they think is happening, and above all before anyone has time to tell them what they should think is happening; so the more journalists the merrier. And also the more climate polls, like the latest one in which two thirds of respondents reported having experienced climate change personally. Has anyone seen the details of that one?
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Geoff, the only ‘two thirds’ figure I know of in recent polls is from the big UNDP one back at the end of January. This is 2/3 said there was a ‘climate emergency’. Quite apart from the fact that people answer such questions from the PoV of ‘who they are’ culturally speaking, and not the PoV of ‘what they know’ (to para-phrase Kahan), this poll was stymied from the start by selection bias. Folks where invited to respond via mobile games apps ‘if they wanted to change the mind of global leadership’, or some-such. We have talked about this poll already on Cliscep. A quick Bing doesn’t show any other recent survey with a ‘two thirds’ headline figure including ‘experienced climate change personally’ in the search string (and this search does bring the UNDP one up as the first hit, plus some subsequent hits).
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ANDY WEST
Your point about the wild swings between reality-constrained and unconstrained support for climate policies is going to experience some interesting political tests this year. Norway goes to the polls in September with the Greens at 3% in the polls, while in Germany they’re around 25% and leading the ruling party in several polls. In turbulent France polling figures for next year’s presidential election are flat for all the leading candidates (the Green is on 6-7%) while in staid Germany there have been wild swings for the two major parties. How to explain the differences? No rational explanation is possible, and I’m still trying to think of a good irrational one…
Trouble is the ugly realities are in the future and are planned to creep up on us slowly, and warning about a future event puts us in the same doomster posture as those we’re combatting. “Beware the heat pump, it’s more expensive than you think” is not convincing. It’s cool to be the first one in the neighbourhood with an EV, and the problems will only be visible when everyone has one.
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Geoff, all parties now wear the same green overcoats over their party attire. There was a piece on good ol’ Aunty, titled sommat like: “Is this Scotland’s climate election?” The reporter went through the oranges, yellows, greens, blues and reds, and every one of them was in favour of Net Zero by 2050, their disgraceful nonsense liberally salted by phrases like “climate emergency.” For some reason a line has been drawn under that issue.
Regarding the Skripals, it seems to me that the botched GRU poisoning is the only rational explanation. The circumstantial evidence alone is enough to push any other theory into very deep woods. I see Mishkin and his friend have now been implicated in blowing up a Czech bunker too: perhaps Putin will wheel them out to explain how they had always wanted to go to the Masters of Rock festival in Vizovice?
Andy, there is a large gap between what people believe and what they are prepared to do about it. I guess this is what you mean by “constrained.” I would expect that most people would say they are concerned about climate. If asked how much of their dosh should be sent to fix it, they would probably say, if answering honestly, about a latte’s worth a month. If only someone could tot up all the money everyday folk are already sending to climate.
I have thought much about what the best strategy to undermine the climate emergency – national suicide nexus might be. At the moment I’m reduced to a Solzhenitsyn-like “never lie” policy. Bringing the matter up in polite conversation is like admitting to voting for Brexit. It can’t be done.
Nevertheless, I find myself shouting “Don’t be so stupid!” at the radio. Maybe that would be productive, if only the radio had ears.
==
Anyone know what Bagdikian’s first law is?
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“Norway goes to the polls in September with the Greens at 3% in the polls, while in Germany they’re around 25% and leading the ruling party in several polls. In turbulent France polling figures for next year’s presidential election are flat for all the leading candidates (the Green is on 6-7%) while in staid Germany there have been wild swings for the two major parties. How to explain the differences?”
I think this is perfectly explainable. The German greens stopped being green quite some time ago, because this was simply an unelectable position. They evolved instead to a mainstream political party having some green views, and indeed even the latter are not as green as some others (on the left), apparently. German logic, I guess. I’ve seen a couple of articles cottoning on to this process over the last couple of years, but a really good one a few weeks back which I think was in the Spectator (didn’t save links). [Plus there is huge disillusionment about Merkel’s party after so long in power, which only loyalty to her personally has stemmed from being an utter meltdown already, also there’s an opposition left that currently happen to be very ineffectual at the moment, much like the UK].
So I think the figures are highly likely to confirm the reality-constrained thing; essentially the less concession green parties make to reality, the lower their support remains. To the extent that anything even close to the XR nonsense will keep them firmly distanced from real power even in countries with strong PR / compensating systems.
Of course there’s lots of complications to this, for instance a hard-line green party may still do better if it has an alliance with a more mainstream party. But having achieved influence via this route it may be able to blackmail its partner to get disproportionate policy implementation (Scotland looks a bit like this, albeit the Greens there have gone trans extremist and whatever else). And comparing the level of hard-line green statements in each nation’s green party manifesto, to their actual levels of public support, may not come up with the expected figure because some are also good at disguising or even falsely representing their true aims and the consequences of same. But it’s always the case, per my above to John, that the realities must be observable to actually *be* realities in the eyes of the voters. Time is not on the side of the greens in this respect, albeit indeed “Trouble is the ugly realities are in the future and are planned to creep up on us slowly…” In practice dates like 2035 and 2030 are only barely in the future now, even to an average Joe or Johanna. I’ve had 3 previous cars that I bought very young and kept for 9 or 10 years, for instance. This timescale started now already passes petrol-free new-sales. I’d have to change to get a ‘last’ petrol car that’ll last as long as possible significantly before the cut-off; even the public, being savvy about purchasing things if nothing else, will know that chaos must ensue around 2027/8 because auto-manufacturers can’t continue to make models for a doomed market. And this is very near indeed. Plus the publicity on electric cars is still very poor; see the Formula Electric races for instance, or the fraught swathes of customers concerning all the Hyundai’s catching fire – 77k recalls and far more with battery curtailment s/w that dramatically cuts range.
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Geoff,
I can see I am going to have to add ‘event’ to my growing list of metaphorical references. 🙂
Andy,
Although my opening statement was presented as a fact, I was actually employing hyperbole. Clearly, slavish acceptance of the media’s message does not happen, otherwise, we would all be of the same opinion, constrained or otherwise. I accept your statistics since I am sure they are well researched.
Jit,
Before writing this article, I was not aware that Bagdikian had coined two laws (the only references I had found were to ‘Bagdikian’s Law of Journalism’. Singular). However, in the ‘autobiographical reflections’ that I linked to earlier, there is this:
“My First Law is true for all reporters, myself included: no newspaper was ever so good as when I worked for it.”
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JIT: ‘Andy, there is a large gap between what people believe and what they are prepared to do about it. I guess this is what you mean by “constrained.” ‘
Yes. Albeit not everyone has a ‘large’ gap. Some people will have a smaller gap. A typically very small number of avid believers, have essentially no gap. It turns out that ‘belief’ in people is not an indivisible whole thing. There is an active ‘belief’, and there is an active ‘disbelief’ too. It is the difference in these two quantities relative to their cultural commitments that cause the variable ‘gap’, which gap can be observed by comparing unconstrained with reality-constrained circumstances. Unfortunately, to make this more complicated, when two cultures interact, like religion and catastrophic climate-change culture (CCCC), or tribal politics and CCCC, or religion and tribal politics, it is very unintuitive how the ‘gap’ will change regarding commitments to both cultures. For instance, the highest concern about climate-change by far in response to unconstrained questions, is in the most religious nations. But these nations also have the *lowest* concern in response to reality-constrained questions. This is ultimately because CCCC and religion both co-operate and compete at the same time [yes, cultures can do this 0: ].
“I have thought much about what the best strategy to undermine the climate emergency…”
I think the Shellenberger / Lomborg / Planet of Humans approach is good. Don’t question the religion, question the incredibly damaging policies. This is the equivalent of not questioning God, but questioning instead his (say) Catholic priesthood upon Earth. Leads to reform in the right direction, and eventually enough head of steam to realise there is no God…
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Important (and especially unusual) news requires multiple reporting. Recall that knowledge of China brought back by Marco Polo (a single “reporter” was not believed when he returned to Europe.
Intuitively I don’t believe in Bagdikian‘s Law. For big news stories, competition within a flock of reporters is more likely to root out aspects of the story that otherwise would go unnoticed. Each reporter worth their salt will be eager to find their own scoop.
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Alan,
The only problem with your intuitive disbelief in Bagdikian’s Law is the question of how many reporters (especially those reporting on climate change) are actually worth their salt….
I see a lot of reporters regurgitating “green” press releases on a regular basis.
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ALAN KENDALL
Could have been because of the unicorns and the blokes with one foot which they used as a sunshade.
Absolutely. Mass tourism has put paid to tales of unicorns and monopods, more’s the pity. The good story is the unexpected one, of the “man bites dog” variety. What wouldn’t we give to hear of a remote Amazonian tribe whose only contact with civilisation was a 1970s copy of Newsweek warning of global cooling?
That’s how it should work, and manifestly doesn’t. The theory of proprietor pressure doesn’t explain it for the Guardian, which is owned by itself. Ex-editor Rusbridger has been quite frank about how he was converted to climate catastrophism – a chance conversation with Bill McKibben. (Apparently Monbiot didn’t do it for him – George only gets one casual mention in Rusbridger’s autobiography.)
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JOHN (2nd para from the end:)
I get my Guardian climate news on-line by clicking >environment >climate change. When I was staying in a house with the real paper version delivered daily (all 80+ pages) I was surprised that the climate articles I was used to reading at the top of their web page either weren’t there, or were tucked away discretely out of sight. On the other hand, you’d find the official policy being pushed in the most unlikely places, like by the chess correspondent:
etc.
The Guardian used to publish regular articles by or about Bjorn Lomborg, in the perfectly rational expectation that readers might be interested in another point of view, just as they used to publish articles by Enoch Powell or the communist historian E. P. Thompson. That this would be unthinkable now, at the New York Times or le Monde as well as at the Guardian, shows that we’re faced with a problem larger than climate angst, whether it’s a culture in Andy’s sense or simply a case of mass hysteria.
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A good example of what Bagdikian is on about would be the coverage of India’s current Covid epidemic. Once you’ve pointed out that there are logistical problems in a country of a billion people with huge disparities of wealth and development, you’ve said it all. But journalism can’t work like that. All kinds of constraints limit what one can say about a country whose culture, ethnicity, and religion is so different from ours, and which is the country of origin of millions of our citizens, including half the British government, I believe. But once it’s established that India is the story, everyone has to have a point of view.
So there they are, all reporting the same banalities, interviewing an infinitesimal sample of witnesses to tragedy. Luckily they burn their deceased, which makes for some great photography (or do I mean “iconic memes”?)
I’ve got a couple of books that demonstrate that journalism doesn’t change much through the ages. One is a collection of articles from the 19th century Illustrated London News, the other a selection from Hitler’s wartime English language propaganda. Both are strangely obsessed with people of colour, just like today’s Guardian.
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Geoff,
I’m sure you’re right. Bagdikian was refering to a situation in which the media were literally travelling to a scene to report – the more that travel, the more the accuracy of reporting suffers. It seems to be a case of ‘the more the merrier’, when merriment isn’t what is needed. And so the agenda switches from the need to unearth the truth, towards a statement of presence – “I’m standing here in front of…”, etc. Journalism seems to morph into a kind of tourism, complete with selfies and sound bites. I guess I was trying to imply in my article that most journalists reporting on climate change are just tourists, in this metaphorical sense: If the truth is the landscape, they are ruining it simply by turning up in their droves to look at it.
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