Ebb and flow of climate coverage

The Australian – COPENHAGEN has had a language all its own this past fortnight as delegates battled the minutiae of draft agreements. The obscure acronyms of the summit went over the heads of most of us, but it set us thinking about the way some words related to the environment and green issues are now commonplace. Think about the big one, climate change. A decade ago, it was scarcely used in news reports: this year, it has been hard to escape. In 2000, The Weekend Australian and The Australian published just 128 stories that mentioned climate change. In the year until December 14 this year, the figure was just shy of 3300. That’s an average of more than 10 references each day. It was not always so. Climate change was level pegging with “global warming” until 2005 but the following year it took off as the phrase of choice when talking about what Prime Minister Kevin Rudd likes to call the “moral challenge of our times”, overtaking global warming, which this past year was mentioned 899 times. Read Article

Ed – Considering that the majority of newspaper articles nowadays originate from a press release from a vested interest group/corporation/political party that is a hell of a lot of effort and cost investment when transposed across all the world’s media. Most will not have be sent out for altruistic reasons. A return on investment is always eventually required.

Tags: climate, media, nature of corporations