TEHRAN – A Texas University professor says all news media mostly focus on “covering environmental events” rather than warning about the long-term effects of environmental degradation or climate change.

“I personally think the media should devote more time and space to long-term environmental issues,” Rusty Todd said in an e-mail interview with the Mehr News Agency conducted by Hossein Kaji and Javad Heiran-Nia.
Following is the text of the interview:
Q: What are media’s roles in policy-making concerning environmental problems?
A: That varies from country to country. In countries like China, the media serve as a voice for the state and promote state policies on the environment. At the same time, they do independent coverage that exposes environmental problems and sometimes criticizes the state. In most of the Western countries, the media are more independent. The cover, but generally don’t promote, state environmental policies (unless in an editorial)—proposals by the president and members of Congress, for instance, that would change environmental law. Their coverage tends to be more critical, as they are freer to set their own agendas. And of course news media everywhere cover bad news more effectively than good news. You rarely see a headline that says, plane lands safely in Hong Kong.
Q: How do you evaluate the capacity of media in putting environmental problems, including climate change or the ozone layer depletion, on political agenda?
A: This is a complicated question. If media are state-run, they can saturate coverage with environmental problems like ozone and climate change as a matter of government policy, or they can ignore it that’s the official policy. If the media are independent, they can choose to cover whatever they like. They tend to like disasters like the Exxon Valdez oil tanker, but they do a lot of “think pieces” on the more long-term environmental problems, too. I think all news media do a better job at covering environmental events than they do long-term issues. You can cover a big chemical spill until it’s cleaned up—there’s a specific thing going on. With climate change, for instance, there’s no disaster scene, and there’s no discreet event since climate change is everywhere and slow to develop. I personally think the media should devote more time and space to long-term environmental issues. The question is, how do you make that news almost every day?
There’s also the question of audience. People have many alternatives for consuming information, and they don’t pay attention to just a few news media as they formerly did. Now everyone uses the Web to get information from all over the place. Even if an individual newspaper were to saturate its coverage with environmental issues, there’s no guarantee that the audience will be influenced.
*****Rusty Todd is Professor of college of communication in the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include the impact of communication variables on financial market behavior, emerging communication technologies, and international economic news coverage. Todd's research has been published in Journal of Communication, Communication Research and Journalism Quarterly