TVNZ's Miriama Kamo, Newsroom's Marc Daalder and RNZ's Eloise Gibson at the AUT's climate change journalism event 'Framing the Emergency.' Photo: Hayden Donnell
In 2021 climate change minister James Shaw talked up the government's commitment to the Paris Agreement on Facebook.
"We need to cut global emissions by 45 percent, below 2010 levels, by 2030," he said.
"Now is the time we must decisively choose the future we want for our children."
The tenor of political discourse has changed a little since then.
Our current crop of ministers are less bullish about the transition to a low-carbon economy.
"We're not going to be guilt-tripped by these fanciful accounts that the planet is boiling. We need NZ's natural resources!" Resources Minister Shane Jones said Facebook last year, in a post set against a backdrop of clipart flames.
Resources Minister Shane Jones nails his colours to the mast on Facebook. Photo: Facebook
Jones is following in the footsteps of politicians overseas.
Donald Trump came to office in the US with the catchy mantra "Drill Baby Drill" in his inauguration and State of the Nation speeches.
In some respects, the media environment has followed a similar trajectory to the political one.
Back when James Shaw was issuing those optimistic pronouncements, several of our major media companies were making their own commitments to climate action.
Stuff had launched two long-term climate coverage projects.
Quick! Save The Planet was launched in 2018. The site's editor, Patrick Crewdson, said it wouldn't give space to what he called "debunked denialism".
"We just want to really pound away at climate change coverage on a regular basis. Increase the intensity of it. And to make the problems of climate change feel urgent and tangible and unignorable," he told Mediawatch at the time.
That morphed into The Forever Project, launched in March 2020 just as Covid-19 locked the country down. It was devoted to in-depth climate coverage from science journalists like Eloise Gibson and Olivia Wannan.
The New Zealand Herald and other media organisations also got in on the act, signing up to the global Covering Climate Now initiative and creating their own climate projects.
Fast forward to today, and the Forever Project still exists, but doesn't have any dedicated reporters.
Gibson and Wannan have both left Stuff, the former for RNZ and the latter to do communications for the Carbon Removal Research project at the University of Canterbury.
Jamie Morton, who did in-depth climate reporting as a science reporter at the Herald, is now freelancing.
Climate change has dropped down the news agenda, and Gibson is now the only dedicated climate reporter at a mainstream news media outlet.
Who cares about climate change? poster for the AUT debate about climate change journalism. Photo: RNZ Mediawatch
This week's Framing the Emergency event at AUT came at a fraught time for the industry.
A panel of Newsroom's Marc Daalder, TVNZ Marae presenter Miriama Kamo and Eloise Gibson told the gathering she got her hopes up when she saw other countries' media teams at the COP 15 Copenhagen climate summit back in 2009.
"They would have ten people in the media room working in shifts around the clock to cover different angles on this crisis. I was so jealous, and I thought: 'Is New Zealand ever going to do this?'
"Spoiler alert: it really did not," she added.
Why not? The panel pondered the parlous state of the media's finances and climate change being dragged into the culture wars.
They also said despite the dearth of dedicated climate reporters, climate denial is now uncommon - and many journalists increasingly refer to the crisis in stories about subjects from weather to power prices.
Climate in the culture war
Marc Daalder - Newsroom's senior political reporter who covers health, energy and extremism as well as climate change - said climate change getting caught up in partisan battles between the right and left made it more challenging for journalists to state the "very basic facts" at the heart of the issue.
He pointed to outgoing deputy prime minister Winston Peters casting doubt on NIWA's data last year about carbon levels in the atmosphere. He made similar claims during the 2023 election campaign.
"When they're covering the statements of politicians, it gets really difficult," Daalder told Mediawatch at the AUT this week.
"I don't think the media has figured out how to - while maintaining the trust of our audience - say 'that's culture war BS. That's just not a thing'."
Gibson pointed out that some media organisations did fact-check Peters' claim.
But while doing so can prompt accusations of bias and sometimes online abuse, she saw them as bread and butter for news organisations.
"I don't think you can tailor your reporting to what a small group of people are going to say. You need to tailor your reporting to what you know to be accurate, what you know to be representative, and what you know most people in New Zealand want to know. They just want to know as close as you can get to the facts," she said.
"I don't actually think that's a partisan or political thing to do. It's just doing your job."
Stating the facts about climate change may not be biased, but that doesn't mean it's not political, Gibson said.
"I don't think you can separate covering climate change from politics because policy and economic decisions are intrinsically tied up in climate change action," she said.
"You can't not tackle politics in that. But that's not the same as being partisan."
Caught in the cutbacks
Both Gibson and Daalder pointed to media cutbacks as the true existential threat to climate coverage.
Gibson was worried that low salaries and a lack of opportunity were driving young reporters out of the industry.
This wasn't just a hypothetical concern. One former young reporter who'd recently left the industry for a climate advocacy agency was in the crowd listening to the media panel.
"I would find it hard to look that person in the eye and say: 'My job is going to be here for you in 10 years'. I hope there'll be 10 of my jobs, 20 of my jobs - but it's hard."
Daalder said that as newsrooms have slimmed down, specialist climate coverage has been sacrificed in favour of what editorial leaders perceive to be 'core news' coverage.
Rather than resisting that, Gibson saw a path forward for reporting that shows how climate change impacts immediate concerns like the cost of living.
She cited the cost of gas, changes to the transport system, or the price of solar panels and batteries as matters where the slow-moving climate crisis intersects with the everyday.
"It's not that people are not concerned about climate change, it's that they have got immediate and pressing concerns that are pushing that out of their mind, and they don't have the bandwidth. And it's so obvious now that those two things are compatible and connected. So you don't have to make it relevant. It is relevant."
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