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By Bill Dawson

Has CBS News been paying attention to journalism critics who say that rigorous adherence to the concept of "balance" harms coverage of science issues on subjects such as global climate change?

Even if that's not the case, the folks at CBS seem to have reached the same conclusion, judging from a recent "60 Minutes" piece and a subsequent post on the network's blog "Public Eye."

Criticism of the journalistic practice of giving roughly equal space or time to scientific "believers" and "skeptics" on the issue of global warming goes back a long way.

Prominent climatologist Stephen Schneider of Stanford University has been proclaiming since the 1980s that such scrupulous evenhandedness creates "a false dichotomy" that pits scientists warning about climate change with those minimizing or dismissing such concerns. He included an entire chapter on the topic in his 1989 book Global Warming.

Schneider continues making such assertions today. On his personal website, for instance, he maintains a page titled "Mediarology" (the same name he gave to the 1989 book chapter). A sample from the web page:

"Citizens' and scientists' unwillingness or inability to enter into the climate change debate has proven to be a mutually reinforcing and devastating behavior that contributes to false-dichotomy reporting and 'in the box' or 'balanced' journalism: polarizing an issue (despite it being multifaceted) and making each 'side' equally plausible, mainly for the sake of simplicity but sometimes also to 'sex up' a story by introducing bipolar conflict."

Schneider's advice, in part, is that "journalists do indeed need to replace the knee-jerk model of 'journalistic balance' with a more accurate and fairer doctrine of perspective that communicates not only the range of opinion, but also the relative credibility of each opinion within the scientific community."

In 2004, a pair of academic researchers published a statistical content analysis of four major newspapers' coverage of the climate issue over the years, in which they concluded that an over-reliance on the balancing of scientific viewpoints meant the news accounts in question diverged from "the general consensus of the scientific community," represented in the publications of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (see EW article, September 2004). The "60 Minutes" piece titled "A Global Warning," which broadcast on Feb. 19, featured the findings of scientists involved in the eight-nation "Arctic Climate Impact Assessment," who clearly think human-caused changes are happening, and made no effort to present anything resembling balance.

The version of the story posted on CBS's website starts off with this stark passage:

"The North Pole has been frozen for 100,000 years. But according to scientists, that won't be true by the end of this century. The top of the world is melting. There's been a debate burning for years on the causes of global warming. But the scientists you're about to meet say the debate is over. New evidence shows man is contributing to the warming of the planet, pumping out greenhouse gases that trap solar heat."

A brief allusion to climate skeptics was included near the end of the piece, referring to a projection of polar bear extinction: "There are skeptics who question climate change projections like that, saying they're no more reliable than your local weatherman. But [University of Maine scientist Paul] Mayewski says arctic projections done decades ago are proving accurate.

"'That said, the skeptics have brought up some very, very interesting issues over the last few years. And they've forced us to think more and more about the data that we collect. We can owe the skeptics a vote of thanks for making our science as precise as it is today,' says Mayewski."

Two days after the "60 Minutes" story aired, the network's blog featured a post by Brian Montopoli, who noted that the piece featuring correspondent Scott Pelley "largely took the existence of global warming as a given," but "there are those who claim that global warming – and, specifically, the notion that humans are responsible for it – is a myth."

Excerpts from Montopoli's quotation of Pelley's response:

"There is virtually no disagreement in the scientific community any longer about global warming," he says. "The science that has been done in the last three to five years has been conclusive. We talked to the chairman of the National Academy of Sciences (NOTE: This word was incorrectly transcribed and has been corrected), Ralph Cicerone. Jim Hansen at NASA, who's considered the world's leading expert in climate change. The people in the story, who are well respected in the field. There's just no longer any credible evidence that suggests that, a, the earth is not warming or, b, that greenhouse gasses are not the cause. What you do see in the data again and again and again is this almost lockstep increase between the levels of CO2 and the rise of temperature in the atmosphere. And the climate models that predicted these things happening 15 years ago have proven to be accurate."

"It would be irresponsible of us to go find some scientist somewhere who is not thought of as being eminent in the field and put him on television with these other guys to cast doubt on what they're saying," he continues. "It would be difficult to find a scientist worth his salt in this subject who would suggest this wasn't happening. It would probably be someone whose grant has been funded by someone who finds reducing fossil fuel emissions detrimental to their own interests."

Montopoli did what Pelley didn't, however. At the end of his blog post, he closed with this passage:

Still, skeptics remain.

"A favorite ploy by [Anthropogenic Global Warming] alarmists is to repeat ad infinitum that the science about AGW has been settled and that there is consensus among scientists that it is happening and that it will have cataclysmic consequences for our planet," writes Gerrit J. van der Lingen in the National Business Review. "People using these consensus arguments forget that scientific truth is not determined by consensus."

Updated: March 2006

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Environment Writer
Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting
University of Rhode Island
Graduate School of Oceanography
Office of Marine Programs
Narragansett, RI 02882

Tel: 401-874-6211; Fax: 401-874-6485

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