Also see:
2002-Current Issue
Pre-2002 Back Issues
Article Archive
Journalists' Library

"An Inconvenient Truth" is by no means the first wide-release to inspire environmental news along with activist efforts to galvanize public opinion on a major issue.

Nor is it even the first one that Al Gore has promoted as a way to get across his concerns about global warming.

That distinction belongs to a fictional disaster movie about climate change – 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow" – which portrayed the unfolding of a new ice age and other climate calamities, all fueled by global warming and taking place within just a few hours.

Roland Emmerich, director of "The Day After Tomorrow," made no secret in public statements that he was a critic of the Bush administration's policies on climate change, but no one mistook the film for anything but barbed fiction.

A major difference this time is that "An Inconvenient Truth" is a documentary about Gore's own slide show and book of the same title, explicitly produced as part of his effort to mobilize public sentiment.

Also, where scientists (and some environmentalists) were scornful of the scientific underpinnings of "The Day After Tomorrow," Gore's documentary has been praised on the blog RealClimate.org, which is produced by climate scientists.

Eric Steig, an isotope geochemist at the University of Washington who contributes to RealClimate, wrote that despite "a few scientific errors that are important" in "An Inconvenient Truth," the new film generally handles climate science "admirably" (see the article).

The intersection and interplay of movies with environmental politics and news coverage go back at least to the late 1970s.

In 1979, Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemon starred in a cautionary thriller titled "The China Syndrome," about a television reporter discovering the hazards of nuclear power.

Just a couple of weeks later, a major accident did occur at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Amazon.com's review of "A China Syndrome" notes that the real-life accident turned the just-released movie into "a worldwide sensation."

A series of anti-nuclear-power concerts were staged by major rock stars later in 1979, resulting in a successful concert documentary, "No Nukes," which featured Bruce Springsteen and other performers.

Adding to the nuclear industry's headaches was "Silkwood," a fact-based 1983 drama starring Meryl Streep about the mysterious death of Karen Silkwood, an industry whistle-blower who died on her way to meet a New York Times reporter.

More recently, environmentalists sought to take advantage of a major movie based on the work of journalist and author Jonathan Harr to draw public attention to the health risks posed by toxic chemicals.

Hoping to generate news coverage, the Sierra Club issued a national report in 1998 with data from the federal Toxics Release Inventory, highlighting counties with the largest total industrial releases of potentially cancer-causing pollutants.

The organization acknowledged that the report was issued to take advantage of the publicity then surrounding the release of the movie "A Civil Action," which starred John Travolta and was based on Harr's non-fiction book of that name about cancer cases linked to underground pollution in Woburn, Massachusetts.

Piggybacking on the recent coverage and reviews of Gore's movie, the Sierra Club now is promoting its own Cool Cities campaign on global warming on its website.

Given its premise of an instant ice age, there may have been some trepidation among environmentalists about linking their appeals to the "The Day After Tomorrow." But, along with Gore and the liberal group MoveOn.org, some of them tried to do so in order to call attention to more widely accepted threats posed by global warming.

National Geographic News reported at the time: "It may just be a high-octane summer blockbuster, but environmentalists hope 'The Day After Tomorrow' will serve as a wake-up call about global climate change."

Greenpeace, for instance, posted a somewhat wary statement on its website, admitting that "the film has run into entirely justifiable criticism for exaggerating the speed at which cataclysmic changes might happen to the world's climate."

Nonetheless, the group said that if the movie "makes more people think about and act upon the real dangers of global warming, we'll give it two thumbs up."

Conservative groups, meanwhile, cited the film as evidence of environmentalist exaggeration and the need for a skepticism regarding claims about climate change, academic research Matthew C. Nisbet noted in a 2004 article.

In the article, Nisbet, assistant professor in the School of Communication at Ohio State University, assessed the short-term impact of "The Day After Tomorrow."

Among his numerous conclusions was this finding of special interest to journalists covering the environment:

The "political mobilization" surrounding "The Day After Tomorrow" helped to create "a sizable spike in overall media attention to the issue of climate change."

Tabulating related articles for 12 months in four newspapers – Los Angeles Times, New York Times, USA Today and Washington Post – Nisbet found that the largest combined total was in the month when the film was released.