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  BBC 30 Nov 05
Media's eco-stories 'too gloomy'
 By Ben Sutherland BBC World Service, Kuching

The world's media has been criticised for being too negative in its reporting of environmental issues.

Continual coverage of destruction was making people switch off, delegates at the International Media and Environment Summit (Imes) in Kuching, Malaysia, were told.

"We keep crying wolf and we keep overstating the doomsday scenario," said Ong Keng Yong, the Secretary General of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean). "It will not serve the cause of protecting the environment."

Mr Yong used his speech at the summit to say that not enough was being done to make the environment relevant to people's "daily life".

'Part of the problem'

"Coverage should not be limited to highlighting environmental problems," he added.

"Is the media doing enough? Largely reactive stories on the environment do not grab the public in the way that political or economic stories do, unless they are controversial and negative."

He also criticised the portrayal of environment reporters in Hollywood films, saying that they usually "are either dismissed from their job or end up doing something else".

Mr Yong's comments were endorsed by David Suzuki, a renowned environmental film-maker: "The global crisis is getting worse and worse, but people don't want to hear these things anymore. "The problem is this: the media has the concentration span of a hummingbird."

He said that interest in the environment had peaked in 1988, when part of the presidential campaign of George Bush stressed he would be an "environmental president".

But interest has been falling ever since, and the media was now "part of the problem".

Black and white

Former UK ambassador to the UN, Sir Crispin Tickell, however, argued that the media had a difficult job.

Reporters had to span "the long and rickety bridge" between science and politics, he said, adding that scientists often used a complicated vocabulary, while people in the political world wanted "black and white answers".

Too often, this led to short-term thinking, he argued, although he did add that he felt former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had "really trumpeted climate change" in the late 1980s.

Meanwhile, Julian Hector, the editor of the BBC's Natural History Radio Unit, said that environmental reporting and programming was set for a major revolution as it caught up with changes in technology.

People would begin to see the environment as just one of a number of different types of programme, he stated. "We have been caught by surprise by the uptake of broadband. The environment will become a genre... it is a massive challenge."

Opening the Conference, Alan Thompson, the Chief Executive of News World International, said he hoped the gathering would lead to "more dialogue than squabbles".

"It is all very simple - the media leads to public awareness, public awareness leads to public opinion, public opinion leads to public policy."
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