“What It Will Take”: Journalism and Climate Change
Former BBC correspondent and editor Mark Brayne opines on what it will take before climate change is taken seriously by journalists:
As such, I often ask myself — and, obsessively, others — what it will take to get Western-style, ratings-and-profit-led journalism, reflecting as it does the emotions of politics, economics and public opinion, to take climate change and sustainability as seriously as it deserves, as a present, existential threat to the very survival of our species.
Putting it bluntly, I regret to have concluded that this will only happen once very large numbers of people start dying. As in, hundreds of thousands to millions, and quite clearly climate-change-related.
And he applies that to the BBC, which, “on planning next year’s news agenda, have in fact explicitly parked climate change in the category ‘ Done That Already, Nothing New to Say.’ “
