Just how accurate is your go-to news outlet on climate and environmental coverage? That’s a question that Climate Feedback, a group that uses scientists to review news articles similar to the way they’d review a research paper, wants to answer.
Last week, Climate Feedback announced the Scientific Trust Tracker, a feature that will track news outlets’ accuracy on climate change, one scientist-reviewed story at a time. Right now, the Trust Tracker has preliminary data for five outlets: The New York Times, Mashable, the Washington Post, the Telegraph, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal. Climate Feedback’s community of scientific reviewers — which include actively-publishing scientists specializing in climate change, ocean acidification, sea level rise, and other related topics — has reviewed and annotated articles from these outlets, pointing out their strong and weak points. Taking these reviews into account, the Trust Tracker creates a “reliability index” for news outlets’ climate coverage.
“Beyond the daily cycle of news and the buzz of new headlines, the idea is to keep track of what happens at one publication,” said Emmanuel Vincent, who founded Climate Feedback in 2014. “Otherwise, you have a piece that comes and a few days later most people forget about it.”
So far, the Wall Street Journal has fared most poorly in its treatment of climate change. Of the four articles that Climate Feedback scientists reviewed from WSJ, all were dubbed “flawed” with “low” or “very low” scientific credibility. Two of the articles were op-eds by prominent climate confusionist Bjorn Lomborg, who has long criticized many efforts to mitigate climate change as useless or too expensive.
Climate Feedback reviewers have taken issue with many of his points.
“Bjorn is a fan of cost-benefit analysis with high discount rates and a single metric, and it is from that perspective that he derives his repetition of the same message,” Gary W. Yohe professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University and a Climate Feedback reviewer, wrote of a 2015 op-ed of Bjorn’s. “The world has moved on, and the WSJ should know better. Their readers understand risk management; why do not the editors insist that their opinion writers do the same?”
Other outlets have fared better. Four Mashable articles — all by Andrew Freeman — have been reviewed by Climate Feedback scientists, and none were found to be objectionable.
As more and more articles are reviewed by scientists, the Scientific Trust Tracker’s data will become more and more comprehensive, Vincent said.
“This is more of a mock-up and an idea at this stage. We want to increase the frequency of the fact checks,” he said.
Climate Feedback is in the midst of a crowdfunding campaign, which ends on Friday. After that’s over, the group wants to expand its fact-checking to other outlets, and has created a poll to allow the public to vote on which ones to target. So far, the group has used audience size — and, of course, whether or not the outlet actually covers climate change — as deciding factors in which outlets to pull stories from.
It’s a really powerful thing. This is such a manipulated topic.
Jeff Chanton, the John Widmer Winchester Professor of Oceanography at Florida State University, is a reviewer for Climate Feedback. He hasn’t annotated any stories yet — stories are sent out to Climate Feedback scientists to review based on whether their topic corresponds with the scientists’ expertise — but he’s very supportive of the group’s work.
“I think it’s a really powerful thing. This is such a manipulated topic,” he said.
Climate change has indeed been seen as one of the worst examples of “false balance” in the press. Ninety-seven percent of actively-publishing climate scientists agree that climate change is happening and that it’s “extremely likely” humans are causing it, but some outlets still present the issue as a debate in the scientific community. A 2013 report by Media Matters found that outlets that typically lean to the right, such as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, over-represented climate denier views in their coverage of that year’s IPCC report. Even more traditionally neutral outlets, such as the BBC, were found to include this false balance, the report found. However, things are looking up at some outlets: In 2014, the BBC told its reporters to reduce the amount of air time it gives to climate deniers and others with anti-science views.
And, with the help of Climate Feedback, more outlets could be pressured to take accurate climate coverage more seriously. The site has already gotten some feedback from columnists and reporters: After seeing a poor review of a Forbes piece on Climate Feedback, another Forbes climate contributor, University of Georgia professor and meteorologist Marshall Shepherd, flagged some of his Forbes pieces for the organization as examples of scientifically-sound Forbes content.
“It’s important for [outlets] to be seen as accurate,” Vincent said. Maybe not all will take Climate Feedback’s reviews into account in future reporting, but he’s sure some will.