Journalist/author-turned-activist Ross Gelbspan and others have long complained that many reporters understate global warming's threats because they balance the views of the great majority of scientists who acknowledge human influence on climate and see a need for action with statements by a handful of others, who are skeptical about humans' role and the need for action.

Now, a pair of university researchers have used statistical tools in a formal content analysis of four "prestige" newspapers coverage of climate change. They conclude that giving equal attention to opinions of the two disproportionately-sized scientific camps has distorted news accounts about the issue.

In the four newspapers -- New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal -- this reliance on balance meant that the thrust of global warming coverage often diverged from "the general consensus of the scientific community," according to this study, published in the July issue of the academic journal Global Environmental Change.

The analysis was the work of two brothers, Maxwell Boykoff of the Environmental Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Jules Boykoff, a visiting assistant professor of politics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

"In a lot of ways, we want people to step back and take a look at the idea of balance," Jules Boykoff said in a phone interview with Environment Writer. "It seems perfectly reasonable, but it's not as simple as it seems. It's not one size fits all."

Noting that the Society of Professional Journalists dropped "objectivity" from its ethics code in 1996, Boykoff said he hopes journalists will likewise re-examine the principle of balance, because it "doesn't apply in all cases."

The Boykoffs clearly believe that global warming is one area where balance has harmed coverage. "You've got 1,600 to 2,500 scientists (participating at different times in the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), saying global warming is a serious problem and needs serious actions," Boykoff said. "On the other side is a small collection of scientists, many of whom are funded by oil and (other) fossil-fuel interests."

In their study, the Boykoffs wrote: "Balanced coverage does not, of course, always mean accurate coverage. In fact, when it comes to coverage of global warming, balanced reporting can actually be a form of informational bias. Despite the highly regarded IPCC's consistent assertions that global warming is a serious problem with a 'discernible' human component that must be addressed immediately, balanced reporting has allowed a small group of global warming skeptics to have their views amplified."

In their analysis, the researchers studied 636 randomly selected news articles, published between 1988 to 2002, from an overall collection of 3,543 articles. About 41 percent of the larger sample were from the New York Times, 29 percent from the Post, 25 percent from the Los Angeles Times and five percent from the Journal.

The researchers found that of the 636 articles they assessed, 52.7 percent gave "roughly equal attention to the view that humans were contributing to global warming, and the other view that exclusively natural fluctuations could explain the earth's temperature increase."

About 35.3 percent stressed human anthropogenic contributions to global warming, but presented both sides of the scientific debate, an approach that the Boykoffs write "most closely mirrored the scientific discourse itself." About 6.2 percent emphasized skeptical views about the human role in global warming, while about 5.9 percent solely reported on human contributions.

The analysis started with coverage in 1988, the year that climate scientist James Hansen gave dramatic congressional testimony about global warming; a heat wave gripped much of the United States for months, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher delivered a public warning about human-caused climate change. That same year, the IPCC was established.

The Boykoffs concluded that "the vast majority" of the coverage from 1988–90 emphasized human contributions to climate change. But "balanced" articles quickly came to predominate from 1990 onward -- the period when majority scientific opinion was coalescing in a series of IPCC reports. In their paper, the researchers assert that this shift "can be explained by the increasingly complex politicization of the global warming issue," and by the emergence of "a small group of influential spokespeople and scientists who emerged in the news to refute these (IPCC) findings."

In his new book "Boiling Point" (see review in EW's July-August 2004 issue), Gelbspan accuses journalists of "laziness" committed "in the name of journalistic balance." In his interview with EW, Jules Boykoff was much less harsh.

"I'm very sympathetic to journalists," he said, adding that the study "is by no means an attack on individual journalists themselves."

With the growth of multimedia conglomerates, cutbacks in editorial staffs and reductions in functions such as investigative reporting, reporters are increasingly called upon to be generalists rather than specialists, he said.

Without the time to gain expertise on a complex subject such as climate change, many tend to "play both sides" with a "balanced" account of the scientific debate, he added.

(The study, "Balance as bias: global warming and the U.S. prestige press," is available for a fee through http://www.elsevier.com/locate/gloenvcha. An online abstract is free. The paper was published in Global Environmental Change, Vol. 14, Issue 2.)