Media often reports climate change as a doom and gloom scenario and ends up pushing people away. Can we get them to tune in and take action?
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In News Decoder’s Top Tips, we share advice for young people from experts in journalism, media literacy and education. In this week’s Top Tip we show you how to tell convincing and compelling climate stories. Top Tips are part of our open access learning resources. You can find more of our learning resources here. And learn how you can incorporate our resources and services into your classroom or educational program or by forming a News Decoder Club in your school.
At age 24 Amina McCauley snagged a job as a journalist with the idea that she would do great stories about the environment.
McCauley is now the program manager of News Decoder’s EYES project for Empowering Youth Through Environmental Storytelling, a project funded by the European Union.
At the time. though. she ended up at a newspaper that was more concerned about survival in the new digital age. They just needed to get readers to click on and pay for stories.
“I was writing five articles a day while some reporters were writing six or seven,” McCauley said. “Stories had to be written fast so we’d always interview the first person we knew who would pick up.”
Because the stories needed to be “newsworthy” she rarely wrote long explanatory stories. In particular, she had no time to do the environmental stories that had first propelled her into journalism.
“The media is one of our main sources of information, but the systems ruling it hinder its purpose,” she said.
Good climate stories are complicated.
Looking back, she wonders whether it was her own lack of knowledge that prevented her from doing those stories. Good climate journalism is complicated and finding good sources of information time consuming.
She said that maybe had she been better educated in high school on climate change, she would have been better able to incorporate that knowledge into the stories she had to pump out quickly. Most people lack this preparation in high school. According to the science journal Lancet, almost 60% of young people say they are very worried about climate change.
Having sufficient knowledge about climate change not only alleviates concerns but drives young people to act.
Hear the full conversation between Amina McCauley, Marcy Burstiner and Matthew Pye.
McCauley explored this dilemma in a podcast conversation with News Decoder’s Educational News Director Marcy Burstiner and Matthew Pye, founder of the Climate Academy and philosophy teacher at the European School Brussels II as part of the EYES project. Through EYES, News Decoder and the Climate Academy have created a set of classroom modules for high school teachers that combines climate science with journalism.
Pye founded the Climate Academy with the realization that to affect the change needed to address the climate emergency, schools needed to stop teaching about the environment in the compartmentalized way they tend to do; in physics students learn about how the environment works, in economics they learn about costs associated with climate change. It needed to be taught holistically.
Connecting the dots
Burstiner said that journalism is one of those rare places where knowledge is connected. In the reporting process, a journalist might talk to a scientist, an economist, a historian and a politician.
“These people don’t talk to each other,” she said. “They are all compartmentalised. The journalist ends up becoming the one person who is connecting all these different pieces.”
But as McCauley found, the news organizations rarely support that type of in depth reporting. The result is that climate stories tend to be both superficial and alarmist. And that defeats its very purpose, Burstiner said.
“Journalism serves to inform and entertain,” she said.
When it does both it does it effectively. But often climate stories are geared to simply inform. They end up distancing people. They feel troubled and helpless and don’t want to think about it. “The worst thing that can happen is to get people to not think about it,“ Burstiner said. “There is a concentration on the horrors and not enough discussion about solutions.”
Moving from simplistic to depth
Meanwhile, when stories present solutions they tend to do so simplistically; what an individual can do right now.
That doesn’t connect people to systemic change. Burstiner said that’s because the journalists themselves don’t understand all the connections and they are under pressure, as McCauley was, to file stories quickly.
“So you don’t get the depth of stories told in a compelling way to be able to attract the readership and the mass readership that’s really necessary,” Burstiner said.
But remember, McCauley wondered if she could have reported better stories had she been better prepared with the basic knowledge about climate change. So one piece of advice Pye gives is to stop questioning the science, which has been done so often, and start accepting basic facts about the rising carbon levels, the risks of mass extinction and tipping points beyond which it will be difficult, if not impossible to reverse.
If journalists can start from that, it gives them more room in stories and more time for reporting. That can enable them to make the connections between the people and communities climate change is affecting and the different types of people working to solve the problems.
Creating important conversations
When journalists can connect different areas of knowledge they can spur important conversations. When the scientist talks to the historian they realize there were ways people solved a problem 100 years ago. And when the economist talks to the scientist or politician or engineers they realize there are ways to pay for solutions.
But, Burstiner said, you also have to tell the stories in ways that people can actually understand.
The stories you see in academic journals, for example, are written for people who already have the knowledge. They aren’t written for common people so common people don’t know what is going on or can be going on in these high levels, she said.
At the other extreme, stories told through mainstream news sites focus too much on individual action — recycling, electric cars — that don’t result in the systemic change needed to cool down the planet.
Big change happens when stories move people to convince their politicians or CEOs of companies. Corporations and politicians are not going to push for change without it coming from the bottom. “Their jobs have to be at stake,” Burstiner said.
But people are not going to call for change if they don’t understand that there are actions these corporations and politicians could take.
“The biggest problem we are facing is ignorance,” Burstiner said.
So how do you inform the public in a compelling way without boring them to tears or making them feel that the problem is unsolvable? Burstiner and Pye give the following tips:
1. Forget objectivity.
The idea that the journalist can’t take sides should not apply to climate change stories. “You can’t be objective if you are living in a world where it is hard to breathe, where a third of your trees are going to die off,” Burstiner said.
You simply can’t face a life or death situation coldly. “That’s passion and anger and emotion,” she said. “That’s what you want in your stories because that is what will get people to care. Not cold facts. People don’t want to hear cold facts.”
Instead of objectivity, journalists should focus on telling fact-based and data-driven stories from verified sources of information.
2. Make the story understandable and relatable.
If you tell a big story people can’t process it. That’s why journalists tend to do stories about things like recycling. “People understand what to do with their cans and bottles; they don’t understand mass extinction,” Burstiner said.
If you tell readers or listeners that millions of people will die, they cannot process that so they end up not caring. “But if you show them one person, one family at risk of dying you can get the entire world to care,” she said
To get them to care about mass extinction you must show them one furry little critter who will disappear. “So it is about breaking a really big story into something that people can really understand,” Burstiner said. “That gets their empathy and when you get their empathy you can get them to act.”
3. It isn’t enough to tell a compelling story.
If you only do that, you get people to tell each other stories. “That is where they think they are being active but they are not,” Burstiner said.
When facts intertwine with emotion and passion, the story becomes both compelling and convincing. “That’s when you move people,” Burstiner said. “It gets them to actually change something.”
4. Push for societal change.
To do that the journalist must steer that desire to act into something that actually can produce change, something that is more than recycling or getting off single-use plastics.
To do that journalists themselves must have the knowledge of basic climate science.
Pye said there are historical examples where a compelling story combined with solid facts spurred massive societal change. He points to the U.S. civil rights movement.
“There you had a system focus from the very beginning,” Pye said. “Those people doing those protests would never settle for things that were not legal, not binding that were not at a policy level. You didn’t have people campaigning for slightly comfier chairs for Black people in cafes.”
Instead, he said, they called for a national civil rights law. And by 1964 they had a law that changed centuries of systems-level abuse.
Questions to consider:
- Why is it not enough to focus on facts in a story if you want to effect change?
- How can you get emotion and passion into a story about climate change?
- What climate change stories could you tell in your region of the world?
