“Climate Lab”: “We have too many ‘attitude journalists’ who take sides for climate protection”

Nuclear power. Heating law. Speed ​​limit. Meat. Terms from the world of climate change have social explosive power. People feel left out, fooled or patronized. Also because media doesn’t do a good job, says Stephan Russ-MohlTheir task would be to translate between experts and readers in order to reach the broad public that drives combustion engines, eats meat and does not think about changing the heating, criticizes the media scientist in “Climate Laboratory” by ntv. Instead, the fight for attention is dramatized and escalated, says Russ-Mohl. “At some point, media consumers realize that they are constantly confronted with doomsday scenarios, but the world is not ending.”

ntv.de: If you had to give media like ntv a grade, what would it be?

Stephan Russ-Mohl: This question cannot be answered seriously because every medium is embedded in a context, but generally it is a bad one. I don’t necessarily mean you, this applies to many highly serious media such as the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, “Spiegel” or public broadcasting. Simply because many editorial offices are poorly equipped to meet the diverse requirements of a highly complex world, partly due to the audience’s low willingness to pay. Science editors have become rare in most editorial offices. But when you have to deal with topics such as Covid or nuclear energy, expert knowledge is necessary in order to provide correct information and have a sensible conversation.

In the “Climate Lab” we actually have the opposite problem: readers have contacted us and said that it is sometimes too specific and complicated. When we read We felt that non-academics, older people and even men are now often overlooked in the media.

The challenge for journalists is actually translation: they have to be reasonably competent interlocutors for experts. This really only works “halfway”, because a journalist will never know as much about colon cancer as the specialist. But a journalist must be able to bridge this discrepancy – in such a way that viewers, listeners and readers understand what it’s about.

A common accusation is that many editorial offices are staffed by people who tend to see themselves as Greens and leftists, i.e. are “left-wing green”. Do you also think that is a problem?

“Dirty” is not my language, but that is not an opinion, we know that from Survey. These show very clearly that there is a cultural hegemony in the left-green area in the established media. Almost no one among ARD’s young journalists is inclined towards the CDU, CSU or FDP. As a media observer who still deals relatively intensively with journalism, I have to say: This is a certain problem.

Does this only apply to the staff on the editorial team or also to the articles that are subsequently produced? One could argue that these people are professionals and, despite their left-green leanings, are able to report fairly about other parties.

That is possible, but not necessarily likely. I myself started out in journalism as an active member of the Juso. Some people at Bayerischer Rundfunk quickly noticed this and complained. That triggered a learning process in me: you shouldn’t patronize or proselytize listeners, but rather try to present the different sides honestly and honestly. But that is a process of professionalization that is neglected today. We have too many “attitude journalists” who think that they have to take sides for climate protection, Ukraine, Israel or – more likely at the moment – for Palestine.

The best-known media company in Germany, however, is Springer-Verlag. Its newspapers and online portals are known to be rather conservative and stand by this.

For me, Springer has always been an exception to the rule. In public broadcasting and in almost all other established print and now online media, this cultural hegemony can be found in the left-green area. Even the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” has moved quite a bit to the left and under Mrs Merkel the CDU has also moved much further than before.

But if you look at the heating debate, the tone is by no means set in a way that would please the Greens.

It is clear that the Greens do not like the debate. But if Mr. Habeck does not move in a situation in which our entire energy supply is in question from one day to the next and ensures that the nuclear power plants are allowed to run for a few years longer, but ignores economic and scientific expertise to work on this to capture what the Greens have wanted for decades…

But they are them Emails of the nuclear power plant operators, in which they inform the Ministry of Economic Affairs themselves: We are also against the extension of the operating times, but do not want to say so publicly. Please let politicians take care of this.

I can understand that the operators were not keen on buying new fuel rods and having to adapt to the changed situation again. But for me, nuclear energy is just one example of many where the impression was created that politicians reacted very idiosyncratically to change and did not do what was necessary in the interest of the common good. I do not want to cast any doubt on the fact that climate protection must be pursued in the long term. But politics also means taking people along with you.

But how do you do that? Unfortunately, climate change is often dismissed as a “green” issue. In fact, it is a scientific issue on which a very large majority of scientists agree.

The core problem is that science communication is not working properly. There are many efforts being made. All universities now have well-equipped press offices and bombard editorial offices with media releases of all kinds every day. However, the editorial offices themselves lack science journalists who can take on these reports and process them in a reasonably competent manner. And if that does happen, as in your case, you probably won’t reach the general public, but rather listeners who are somewhat in the bubble. The challenge is to reach people outside this bubble who drive combustion engines, eat meat and don’t think about changing their heating.

And how do you burst this bubble? Experience has shown that as soon as terms such as climate, CO2 emissions or the 1.5 degree target are in the headline, people switch on or off.

This shouldn’t surprise us too much, because we have something of an attention boom in the public eye. I remember that scientists in my field initially discussed why it would be completely impossible to make the climate problem a journalistic and political issue: it is too diffuse and too complex and you need the US and China at the same table get it, otherwise you can’t solve it. Everything else is a show by the Greens without any effect. Against this background, we should be surprised at how successful it has been in bringing the climate issue into the public eye.

Have we already achieved more in the areas of climate change, energy transition and climate protection than was expected?

Yes. This “more” also has to do with the fact that journalists have to dramatize and escalate in the fight for attention in order to survive against the competition. At some point, however, media consumers realize that they are constantly confronted with doomsday scenarios, but the world is not ending at all. Then the credibility problem arises that we have been facing for several years. You probably won’t be able to pull yourself out of this on your own. You have to live with the fact that people believe journalism less.

Is there no way back?

That is the crucial question. I would be happy if I had recipes to offer, but I can only say what doesn’t work: error corrections for false news are a weak instrument because the wrong people usually find out about the correction. Spreading false information is simply much quicker. In this respect, correction is important, but not effective. It would therefore make sense for journalists to explain the media operation and their own fallibility and to say clearly that they don’t know everything. This also applies to research and science. There is now so much information being produced every day that even scientists have great difficulty staying up to date and keeping up with what is happening in their research area. We live in this complex world. You have to make that clear and convey it to people out there if you want to correct something.

Clara Pfeffer and Christian Herrmann spoke with Stephan Russ-Mohl. The conversation has been shortened and edited for better comprehensibility. You can listen to the entire conversation in the “Climate Laboratory” podcast.