ANALYSIS –
By Glynn Wilson –
Satire Meets Academic Research –

WASHINGTON, D.C. – It was cold and pouring down rain on that day in 1989 or 1990 in Mobile, Alabama, when I wrote my first news story about the greenhouse effect, a phenomenon where carbon dioxide, methane gas, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons combine with water vapor to trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere like a greenhouse which keeps plants warm. An expert advocate on global warming from the Sierra Club had come to town to talk about the issue.

That was about the same time Bill McKibben published his book on the subject: The End of Nature.

In the mid-1990s, back when the New York Times published a Science section on Tuesdays and for awhile had a page in the section on the Environment, I followed all the coverage of this issue for years. I even wrote a Master’s Thesis proving quantitatively that news coverage of environmental issues such as global warming have the power to influence public opinion.

This ran counter to the dominant paradigm at the time that said news coverage was simply mirroring what the public already thought. There was a consensus that the New York Times, which was considered by many to be the national newspaper of record, had some power to influence the news agenda of television news and other smaller newspapers at the time. But big news corporations, newspaper chains that funded journalism and communication schools — even executives at public television — were worried about liability from any research showing what they did actually influenced the public. There were already lawsuits against companies that produced violent movies when serial killers testified under oath that they were motivated to do what they did by what they saw in movies and on television.

Even small acts of violence on educational programs and cartoons were being examined. Massive amounts of quantitative research was produced to disprove the theory that children watching violent programming might later commit acts of violence against others. So no one really wanted to hear or acknowledge that massive news coverage of something like problems in the environment might motivate the public to change their behavior or act on it.

Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh had already begun his growing talk radio show calling the New York Times “liberal,” long before Donald Trump came along and called it “failing” and “fake news.” Then along came Fox and Roger Ailes created an entire television news network on cable to cater to the same crowd who had become hooked on Rush Limbaugh. This was to be not just simply a conservative Republican-leaning news outfit. The idea was to be nationalistically pro-American, wearing the stars and bars like a security blanket to get people hooked and follow the propaganda and abandon traditional news networks and mainstream newspapers.

It worked better than any charm. I have no idea if anyone even continues this line of research these days. Much of the research shifted to blogs and then social media. If so, it is never publicized in the popular press.

But I challenge any thinking person to try and argue the point that conservative talk radio and television “infotainment” played a major role in helping to legitimize the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, and later, to help energize people to vote in great numbers for the likes of Donald J. Trump.

I continued to follow the news coverage and conduct research, at one point taking to a New York Times reporter named William K. Stephens, who retired from the paper in the year 2000 and wrote a book about global warming and climate change. I wrote a doctoral dissertation on media coverage of global warming, climate change and how framing news coverage influences public opinion, which was suppressed by conservatives in the academic community who were being told by Karl Rove to get rid of “liberal” professors.

I’ve continued to cover these issues in the New American Journal. See all of our coverage here: Science: Climate Change.

If I were to go back and update some of this media effects research today, I suspect I would find that the influence of the New York Times waned significantly in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal in 2003 and the publicly traded company’s failed attempt to implement a pay wall subscription service in 2005-2007.

I would theorize and hypothesize that conservative talk radio and Fox News and later Breitbart News on Facebook have far more power to influence public opinion now than the Times ever did. It’s as clear as the nose on your face.

We actually have the data to test this right before our very eyes. This will be a qualitative journalistic analysis, not an academic quantitative analysis, but watch this.

I was sitting in my campsite just north of the White House on Sunday night checking out the Facebook news feed when I saw that The Guardian had a story out about the latest international report on climate change. I suggested this after the nation’s attention had been riveted on the Kavanaugh Supreme Court controversy, but he was confirmed anyway: “Meanwhile, can’t we at least talk about this instead of beer and sex in high school?”

The headline was pretty bad and didn’t exactly take off on Facebook. People were still mad, tired and burned out or fired up to continue seething about Kavanaugh. But here is The Guardian story. I suggested since Trump often changes the subject when he loses on an issue to distract, and since he uses the tactic of mocking others like he did to Dr. Ford, then perhaps the media and the Democrats might want to mock Trump for being a climate change denier.

Then Monday morning, the New York Times did just that, topping the coverage on its front page in print and online with stories about the climate change report and related coverage. The Washington Post carried a front page story too. The Times story was mentioned in passing on “CBS This Morning” and other shows. But if it was mentioned on commercial radio or Fox News at all, it was debunked and laughed at.

One of the Times stories did mock Trump.

Dire Climate Warning Lands With a Thud on Trump’s Desk

Crickets.

Trump has so taken over the world’s attention and bashed institutions like the Times and the United Nations and science itself that no one even pays the least bit of attention to a news story which says that the entire human species has only about a decade to try to get climate change under control or face world changing dire consequences. The reaction on Twitter and Facebook was a big, fat yawn.

“While the United Nations warned of mass wildfires, food shortages and dying coral reefs … Mr. Trump discussed his successful Supreme Court battle rather than how rising seawaters are already flooding Miami on sunny days,” the Times wrote.

The details are so technical and boring that even a line like this get’s little engagement: “There is no documented historic precedent” for the scale of changes that will be required.

“The world stands on the brink of failure when it comes to holding global warming to moderate levels, and nations will need to take ‘unprecedented’ actions to cut their carbon emissions over the next decade,” according to a landmark report by the top scientific body studying climate change.

“With global emissions showing few signs of slowing and the United States — the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide — rolling back a suite of Obama-era climate measures, the prospects for meeting the most ambitious goals of the 2015 Paris agreement look increasingly slim. To avoid racing past warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels would require a ‘rapid and far-reaching’ transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before…”

I could say more, and will in the future, but I need to cut this off and take my dog for a walk. Just before I went to publish this, however, I checked in on “The View” on ABC to see what they were talking about. Climate change? Global warming? Nope. Long past allegations of sexual assault, even suggesting that former Senator Al Franken should make a comeback since his case was such a joke.

Sorry to seem cynical or jaded or something. They say sex sells. Clearly it’s true. I guess what the world needs now is for a good looking white female climate scientist to come out on TeeVee with her story of being sexually assaulted by a climate change denier like Donald Trump. Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti could take the case. Now that would get everyone’s attention and we might actually get busy saving the world, not just saving the world from white male privilege, sexual assault and too many beers.

Here’s a thought. Maybe that’s how we could change the Alabama Democratic Party. Does anyone have any sexual assault allegations to report against Joe Reed or Nancy Worley?

How about Governor Kay Ivey? Nevermind that she is a drunk with no ideas on how to govern with health problems so debilitating she may not be able to complete one term when she is elected in November. If she really had a lesbian roommate, now that might make headlines and turn the white male union workers and Republicans who voted for Trump against her.

Dog help the Earth, the great United States of America, and the red state of Alabama. When Dauphin Island, Gulf Shores and the Flora-Bama Roadhouse Lounge in Orange Beach go under water, maybe then enough people might “believe” in climate change due to global warming and the greenhouse effect from the burning of fossil fuels enough to stand up and demand that politicians do something about it. Unfortunately, by then it will most likely be too late.