More than One Degree of Separation  Between Words & Action

It’s great that a big company like News Ltd should be setting an example by going out of its way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This all started when the company’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, who a bit over three years ago, in a remarkable pep talk to his global staff, pledged “our intention to be carbon neutral, across all our businesses, by 2010″. Jonathan Holmes for the ABC’s The Drum reflects on this positive action, but wonders why the newspapers in the Murdoch stable don’t do more for the cause. “As one of the world’s great media companies, News Corporation has the power to do far more to counter the risk of catastrophic climate change than merely to reduce its own emissions.”

By Jonathan Holmes for The Drum, ABC

27 January 2011

You may have seen the full page ads in the papers on Tuesday morning:

How do you change the equivalent of 57,302 light bulbs? Start with one.

That’s how News Ltd, the Australian province of Rupert Murdoch’s global empire, proudly announced that it is now ‘a carbon neutral business’. And if you follow the invitation in the ads to visit News Ltd’s website www.1degree.com.au, you can read about all the wondrous things that the company is doing to reduce its carbon footprint, from applying infrared paint “to reduce heat absorption through the press hall roof” at its Chullora press plant in Sydney, to running ‘an incredibly popular bike discount scheme’ at the Adelaide Advertiser, “with 30 staff rushing to take up the offer”.

It would be easy, and in my opinion, quite wrong, to scoff. It’s great that a big company like News Ltd should be setting an example by going out of its way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The fact that it will also be reducing its power bills shouldn’t be any reason for cynicism. Energy efficiency can be capital-intensive: the pay-off in reduced power bills can take years to achieve, and in any case often amounts to just a tiny percentage of a large business’s overall costs. That’s why many still don’t make much of an effort.

That News Ltd does so can be sheeted home to its parent company’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, who a bit over three years ago, in a remarkable pep talk to his global staff, pledged “our intention to be carbon neutral, across all our businesses, by 2010″.

Why? Well, argued Murdoch, because it makes good business sense, and because News Corp’s staff, and more importantly, its global audienes, are interested in this climate change stuff; but principally because “in Melbourne, 2006 was the 10th consecutive year with below average rainfall. And 2005 was the hottest year on record throughout Australia… Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can’t afford the risk of inaction”.

Last Thursday, the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation sent out an important announcement from its Geneva headquarters. Together with 2005 and 1998, it said, the year 2010 ranked as the warmest on record. “The 2010 data confirm the Earth’s significant long-term warming trend,’ said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. “The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998″.

The findings are based on three separate datasets, two maintained in the United States and one in the UK. And they’re significant, not just because climate change sceptics have been maintaining for years that since 1998 the earth has been cooling, not warming; but because, in the words of Professor Matthew England of the UNSW’s Climate Change Research Centre, “in the absence of global warming, you would have thought 2010 should be one of the coolest on record because there’s been a very strong La Nina for about eight months of the year”.

1998 was an extraordinarily hot year globally, largely because of a very strong El Nino phenomenon. El Nino conditions prevailed in 2009 too, but in around May of 2010 there was a rapid switch to its opposite, La Nina, as abnormally cold water upwelled to the surface in the eastern Pacific. That, along with record warm ocean temperatures north of Australia, is what has caused the extraordinary amount of rainfall in eastern Australia in the past few months; and it’s also why, in central and eastern Australia, 2010 was an unusually cool year.

The fact that despite this, the global temperature was as high as in 1998, argues Professor England, “taken together with other observations, such as accelerating ice melt, increased humidity, more extreme events and rising sea levels, (indicates that) climate change is progressing at what should be seen as an alarming rate”.

Those quotations aren’t taken directly from anything Matthew England has said to me. They’re from an email he was sent by The Australian’s Debbie Guest, after she’d spent half an hour on the phone with him last Friday. She was checking that he was happy for them to be included in a piece she’d written on the WMO’s announcement for Saturday’s Weekend Australian.

The Oz had carried an AFP wire story about the WMO announcement on the Friday, discreetly placed on an inside page. Debbie Guest’s piece for the Saturday dealt with the apparent paradox that a cool year in Australia was the hottest on record globally. But her story didn’t make it into most editions of the Weekend Oz the next morning. A severely truncated version did appear in early editions, and online, but the quotes from Professor England were conspicuously absent.

When he asked her why, Ms Guest told him that her story had had to be shortened for space reasons – though why that should have affected the online story, she didn’t explain.

Professor England says he’s satisfied Debbie Guest was genuinely trying to do a good job. The shortening was done by someone above her in the hierarchy.

So what did appear in The Weekend Australian that day? Well, nothing in the newspaper (as far as I can see) about the WMO’s announcement- although this alarming story from AFP was posted on The Australian’s website that day.

But The Weekend Oz did find room on its opinion pages for this piece by the ineffable Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. If you can’t understand its tortured mathematics, don’t worry. You’re not intended to. You areintended to think, “Well, I don’t really follow it all, but this bloke seems to be impressively learned, and he says it’s not worth doing anything about climate change”.

That, of course, is precisely the opposite message to the one Rupert Murdoch was trying to send his own troops back in 2007. The evidence for climate change, since then, has only got stronger. The reasons for taking precautionary action have only become more compelling. Of course News Ltd can’t, on its own, affect the global climate by reducing its carbon footprint, and nor can Australia. But if every company, and every nation, acted – or refrained from acting – on the basis of that logic, the chances of eventually stabilising global temperatures at less than catastrophic levels would be reduced to zero.

Well, you may argue, but doesn’t Christopher Monckton have a right to be heard? Don’t news stories get shortened every day? What does all this prove?

Nothing, in itself. You have to be an alert and habitual reader to notice that week after week, year after year,The Australian and The Weekend Australian massage their news coverage and grossly unbalance their opinion pages so as to send the message that the existence of human-induced climate change is highly debatable, and that any action by Australia to reduce its emissions would be economically ruinous and politically foolish.

At least, as The Australian’s former rural reporter, Asa Wahlquist, told a conference of journalism educators last year, “The one bit of good news from this is that it shows that News Limited editors are independent (from Rupert Murdoch)”. She also said that reporting climate change for The Australian was ‘torture’.

The Australian’s circulation may be modest, but it is undoubtedly influential in business and political circles. Fox News in the US, whose presenters are almost unanimous in their virulent climate change ‘scepticism’, is hugely influential. Both, in their different ways, are failing to report fairly and accurately what is arguably the most important global issue of our times.

As one of the world’s great media companies, News Corporation has the power to do far more to counter the risk of catastrophic climate change than merely to reduce its own emissions. As Rupert Murdoch put it back in 2007:

“News Corporation, today, reaches people at home and at work… when they’re thinking… when they’re laughing… and when they are making choices that have enormous impact.

“The unique potential – and duty – of a media company are (sic) to help its audiences connect to the issues that define our time.

“We are only at the beginning of this mission, and we have a long way to go.”

Yes Mr Murdoch. You did then, and you still do

Source: www.abc.net.au