Media Coverage of Climate Change

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The mass media plays an enormous role in influencing the public. In the age of globalization many technologies like Internet, television, newspapers, magazines, radio and so on, make news available and accessible for everyone around the world. The media can easily get any information out there to the public regarding any subject such as political views, health issues, entertainment, education, human tragedies…and those information do have an impact on our everyday life decisions, opinions and raise our awareness on a subject. The media is most of the time the only way people can get information on subject that they cannot fully understand such as science. Because “science is an encoded form of knowledge that requires translation in order to be understood” (Ungar 2000), many studies have shown that the media plays a very crucial role in raising people understanding of the scientific world and the environmental issues, especially the climate change and global warming. Climate change has become an important issue today and people need to understand how serious it is in order to take actions to prevent it from getting worse; and the only way the information can get to the public is via the mass media. Today global warming is raising many concerns and the media coverage is increasing but yet many scientists complain about the limited coverage of the subject because it seems that it is not enough compared to the gravity of the situation. Because of the lack of information, many people are still very skeptical and some are just very confused about the global warming and how it affect our atmosphere. Studies have found that most people learn a large amount about science through consuming mass media news (Wilson 1995) and many surveys ha... ... middle of paper ... ...tributions to the situation are still a very confusing topic to most people around the world. The media has kept the climate change discussions alive through the decades and many international organizations have tried to find solutions to climate change adaptation. But many have criticized the media coverage, especially the U.S media, because they did not emphasize on the solutions, the revolutionary changes that the developed countries and oil companies must do to preserve our atmosphere. Plus they did not emphasize on the help the poor nations need in order to face the mitigation and adaption for the climate change. Also because in most developing countries the climate change and the global warming is still an abstract subject, governments must work with journalists and scientists to improve the media in order to increase people understanding of the situation.

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