Last week Senator Inhofe used his position as the outgoing chairman of the Senate’s Environment Committee to harangue the press: “Much of the mainstream media has subverted its role as an objective source of information on climate change into a role of an advocate.” Predictably, Inhofe didn’t cite any empirical evidence to backup his claim. Still, the question is worth asking: Is there a bias in today’s mainstream media towards global warming? Is the media failing to provide “objective information on climate change?”

A peer reviewed article by Boykoff and Boykoff published in Global Environmental Change in 2004 seeks to answer this question. By focusing on news stories about global warming published in prestige press newspapers, the authors applied statistical testing methods and simple classification techniques to measure the extent to which the consensus views of the scientific community were accurately represented in the press. The article defines the prestige-press as “the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. For reasons of geography, influence, and circulation…these newspapers [are] an important and powerful swathe of the prestige press in the United States.”

The research involved a random sample from a collection of 3543 articles using the search term ‘global warming’ from the period 1998-2002. The researchers found that 52.65% of the coverage gave a balanced account of anthropogenic contributions to global warming, 35.29% in which anthropogenic contributions were given dominant coverage, 5.88% where anthropogenic warming was given exclusive coverage, and 6.18% in which skepticism of the anthropogenic contribution was dominant.

Similar data was analyzed regarding the scientific views on action:

We found that 78.2% of US prestige-press articles from 1988 through 2002 featured balanced approaches in terms of what should be done about global warming, describing with “roughly equal attention” courses of action that ranged from cautious to urgent and and from voluntary to mandatory.

The overwhelming majority of articles presented the scientific community in the throes of a heated debate, when in fact there exists a strong scientific consensus that actions should be mandated immediately. The authors conclude:

So despite general agreement in the scientific community regarding the existence of anthropogenic influences on global warming, coverage seemed to indicate that division within the scientific community was quite even.

What emerges from the study is a picture of biases built into the structure of the media, or a “disjuncture” emerging from “the filter of balanced reporting”. Because a balanced approach is, in theory, a neutral approach, the press has felt obliged to give equal weight to differing explanations for the potential causes of global warming. But, as the data show, balance can become bias; specifically bias is “the divergence of prestige-press global-warming coverage from the general consensus of the scientific community.”

But balance as bias is not the full story, for corporate and power interests, be it implicitly or explicitly, are well aware of the institutional biases built into the structure of the media. What we are seeing here is not necessarily mainstream media colluding with the hydrocarbon industry, but rather a clever manipulation of “tactical media responses and practices guided by widely accepted journalistic norms and values.”

Massive capital investment has been funneled towards scientists who deny global warming, effectively bringing them together (like in 2002 when Exxon hired APCO Worldwide to bring together climate skeptics in a conference aimed at urging the Canadian government not to ratify Kyoto), and giving them a megaphone and a soapbox. Thus their rather marginalized scientific work becomes amplified, as they are empowered to speak in a single voice, and the media, in its eternal quest for “balance”, feels obliged to give equal coverage to what would otherwise have been a ragtag group of outliers.

Concerted propaganda campaigns are at least as old as the written word, but the mega-corporations (and the US government) using tactics that exploit the structural biases in the media are new and alarming. To set the record straight, Senator Inhofe, it seems statistically verified, for the newspapers surveyed at least, that the media is indeed biased, not towards global warming, as you would have us believe, but towards a balanced approach that leaves the public misinformed regarding the true nature of the consensus within the scientific community.