The Mail gives 5 times more space to the Global Warming Policy Foundation than to any other source on climate
- 27 Jul 2011, 15:00
- Neil Roberts
The Daily Mail has given more than five times as much space to
the Global
Warming Policy Foundation's views in its recent coverage of
climate change and 'green taxes' than to any other source.
According to former Independent environment correspondent
Nicholas Schoon:
"The Mail has 'put on the war paint' (a
Dacre phrase) and is campaigning against what it calls green
taxes."
Schoon, writing for
'The ENDS Report', says the genesis of the campaign was a lunch
between Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre and Lord Lawson, founder of
the GWPF.
Our research shows just how reliant the Mail has become on Lord
Lawson's climate skeptic lobby
group. Over the two months following the launch of the paper's
'green taxes'
campaign in
late May the Mail group's coverage of climate change dedicated
a total of 2282 words of quotation, paraphrase and material
referenced to the views of the GWPF.
That's more than five times the space dedicated to the views of
the next most prominent source, Consumer Watch (417 words). The
Confederation of British Industry merited 335 words, while climate
secretary Chris Huhne secured 310.
Word count attributable to source
for all sources. Click to enlarge.
This count is taken from news reports and features, and excludes
two prominent comment pieces penned for the Mail by GWPF director
Dr Benny Peiser and the
GWPF's founder and chair Lord
Lawson. If these are included in the analysis, the GWPF comes
out with around 13 times as much space as Consumer Focus, the next
most quoted source.
The prominence given to the GWPF by the Mail is not fully
reflected by this kind of analysis. Over the two month period the
Mail published at least two front page splashes based almost
entirely on GWPF numbers and quotes. This included the front page:
"
Hidden green tax in fuel bills: How £200 stealth charge is slipped
on to your gas and electricity bill" on 9th June, when the
paper carried three articles based on GWPF sources including a
lengthy
comment piece by Dr Peiser.
Scientists
Another notable feature of the Mail's coverage is that of 31
separate sources used in 28 articles examined, no individual
scientists were quoted. This may be a quirk of the sample, but by
our assessment only two sources, the Centre for Energy Policy
and Technology at Imperial College and the International Programme on
the State of the Oceans were mainly scientific sources,
rather than political, business or lobby groups. The Mail dedicated
a total of 182 words to these two sources in two articles, out of a
total of 6517 sourced words across 26 news and feature pieces.
Investigative reporter and journalism lecturer, Paul Lashmar,
talking about the prominence of the lobby group Taxpayers' Alliance
in the press,
told the Independent the rise of the group is linked to
pressures on journalists:
"Journalists are often now so
overstretched that a lot of work that used to be carried out in the
newsroom is carried out by groups like the TPA. You don't see
extensive research anymore whereas it used to be commonplace in
Sunday papers to have exercises where, for example, you would ring
around every MP for their opinions as the TPA has done numerous
times.
"What you see now is journalists who are
grateful for news which is almost perfectly packaged to go into the
paper with a ready top line. In that sense, journalism is becoming
very passive. It is a processor of other people's information
rather than being engaged in actively seeking out and determining
what the truth of a situation is in an energetic and inquisitive
way."
And, where the angle pushed by groups like the GWPF coincides
with the editorial line of a paper, this can create the conditions
for a paper to become over-reliant on particular sources; a process
described in detail in Flat
Earth News by Nick Davies - the reporter whose phone hacking
investigation is currently rocking the foundations of the British
political and media class.
What we did:
We searched Mail Online and news database Factiva for all
articles published over the two month period 18/5/11 to 17/7/11 -
the two months of coverage following the launch of the Mail's
'green tax campaign' on 18/5/11.
We looked at articles containing the keywords "climate change" or
"global warming", discarding duplicate articles and articles where
climate change or global warming were mentioned, but were not a
main theme of the story - for example, stories about Chris Huhne
which were about his private life rather than his role as a
minister.
This provided 28 articles, including two comment pieces. For these
we looked at all the quoted sources from each article, taking a
word count for direct quotes from those sources, and a word count
for sections of the article which paraphrased the source or where
the information was clearly referenced directly to the
source.
The data is here.