Blame the media for climate woes: analysis

Mainstream U.S. media are to blame for stalled international efforts to reach an agreement to fight climate change, according to a new analysis released by a media watchdog group.

The report, in the latest edition of a magazine published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, said there are multiple examples of major American media organizations watering down recent warnings from peer-reviewed scientific literature about the consequences of global warming and the human-produced pollution that is causing it.

The watchdog group based its analysis on a comparison of American and British headlines and articles about the release of a series of international reports that assessed the latest peer-reviewed on climate change.

"Where U.K. media generally presented climate change as an urgent crisis that requires immediate action, in the U.S. it's still widely portrayed as an unresolved debate," says the article, written by Neil deMause in the July-August edition of Extra!. The coverage is helping to prop up U.S. government policies which suggest aggressive action to tackle climate change could be economically costly, deMause said.

For example, he explained that many Americans were unaware of a British government study by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern that warned the cost of doing nothing would be much worse than immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.