Norms Affect What's Really Reported, And What's Not

Climate change is one of the biggest environmental issues we have today, but one of the reasons the chances that the US will take action are slim is because of journalistic norms, as explained by this journal article about government policy. The norms have caused the scientific perspective on the climate change problem to be misrepresented. Scientists generally speak in a cautious, uncertain language that experts in their field would understand perfectly, but the public may have more difficulty with. Therefore, their language needs to be translated into the clear, certain discourse that is employed by journalists.

According to an article about journalistic norms and their functions, several specific journalistic norms are believed to cause misrepresentation of environmental problems like climate change. The first is personalization, “the tendency to downplay the big social, economic, or political picture in favor of the human trials, tragedies, and triumphs that sit at the surface of events” (Bennett, 2002, p. 45). The media tend to personalize the problems and focus on the individual tribulations instead of the greater context and process. This leads to the belief that the problems are centered around individuals and structural analyses of institutions and government are ignored.

Another journalistic norm that influences news output about environmental problems is dramatization, where “news dramas emphasize crisis over continuity, the present over the past or future, conflicts” and “downplay complex policy information, the workings of government institutions, and the bases of power behind the central characters” (Bennett, 2002, p. 46). Dramatized news tends to ignore comprehensive analysis about a problem, and rather focuses on the plots on the surface. It trivializes the news content, as well as blocking out news that does not have an immediate conflict or controversy.

The third journalistic norm is novelty. Journalists face a need to report “new” news, and repeatedly reporting on the same environmental problem may dedramatize it. Therefore, persistent and growing environmental problems may be unreported because there is nothing new to report. Journalists prefer to publish stories that are fresh and new over stories that have already been reported on. Consequently, they reject about continuous, chronic problems in favor of those about day-to-day crises.

These journalistic norms –personalization, dramatization, and novelty- cause mass media coverage of environmental problems like climate change to be deficient. We should keep in mind these journalistic norms at play when reading about environmental problems on the news.


By: Alice Leung