Journalists using ‘weasel words’ to deny the reality of climate change

STUDY: US Reporters Use More Weasel Words in Covering Climate Change, Mother Jones,A new paper finds that our journalists are constantly hedging on a scientifically settled issue—considerably more so than reporters in Spain.By Chris Mooney Jun. 3, 2014 It’s no secret that different countries have different densities, so to speak, of global warming denial. In particular, English-language speaking nations like the US and the UK tend to be relative denialist hotbeds, and their media include a considerable amount of global warming skepticism. By contrast, media researchers have found that in Spanish-speaking countries like Mexico and Chile, as well as in European nations, journalists tend to cast much less doubt on climate research.

And now, a new paper captures the US media’s relative discomfort with climate science in a new way: By comparing the preponderance of words that suggest scientific uncertainty about climate change in two US newspapers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, with the concentration in two Spanish ones, El País and El Mundo. The study, by Adriana Bailey and two colleagues at the University of Colorado-Boulder, is just out in the journal Environmental Communication. It finds a considerably greater concentration of such uncertainty-evoking words in the US papers in their 2001 and 2007 coverage of two newly released reports from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The study used a technique of linguistic analysis that involved examining newspaper articles for “epistemic markers,” defined as “any words or expressions suggesting room for doubt” about climate science. Obviously, there are many, many such words and phrases, and the list of terms considered was quite exhaustive, ultimately comprising 10 separate grammatical categories. In English, terms suggesting uncertainty ranged from “common hedging verbs” (believe, consider, and appear) to “synonyms for uncertain” (blurry, inaccurate, andspeculative)…….

The study contained several other troubling findings as well. As suggested by the figure at right, the total “epistemic density” of US articles in actually increased from 2001 to 2007, even as scientific uncertainty about climate science declined. “Contrary to expectation, we saw increases in hedging, or constant amounts of hedging, in all four papers we analyzed,” says Bailey.

Here’s why that’s so odd. This was, after all, the period in which the IPCC went from saying it is “likely” that humans are driving global warming, to saying it is “very likely.” Yet hedging was more prevalent in the latter time period, not less. What’s more, it looks as though the increase in hedging words in US papers from 2001 to 2007 occurred solely at the New York Times—where it grew from 141 words in 10,000 to 297 in 10,000—even as the Wall Street Journal did not show a change over time (236 words versus 235 words per 10,000). (The study did not examine how papers covered the 2013 release of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, which jacked up the scientific certainty even further.)

And there was one more finding of note. The researchers specifically categorized the uncertainty-laden terms by tone, so that more neutral words, like “estimate,” were separated out from clearly negative ones, words that forcefully suggested that the science of climate change is dubious. …….http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/06/climate-media-journalists-hedging-new-york-times