By Debra KaufmanIn Miami, WTVJ-TV special projects producer Jeff Burnside discovered an area of the Florida coastline that was a true flood zone, based on data from the federal government’s new laser-measured elevation study.Then he found that new homes were being built there.“We talked to homeowners in this neighborhood who had no idea their neighborhood would be inundated as sea levels rise and hurricane storm surges hit,” said Burnside.Global warming is typically perceived as a story about far away — melting icecaps in the Arctic — and far in the future; both factors make the climate change story a hard sell to TV news directors and newspaper editors.“The challenge has been to convince the local news manager that global warming can be a local story,” said Burnside. “For this story, neighborhoods that never imagined they’d be potentially inundated realized for the first time that they could be.”Covering climate change has never been an easy task. For years, environmental journalists felt compelled to give equal time to the naysayers, but times have changed.“I don’t think you see this false balance as much as you used to,” said Associated Press science writer Seth Borenstein. “On the Internet you have some people who, no matter what the science says and what the numbers show, won’t buy it. But they’re not scientists. It’s mainly political.”While the issue global warming been a major national environmental story for years, it now is also becoming an increasingly local one.Society of Environment Journalists President Christy George, who is special projects producer at Oregon Public Broadcasting, points to stories about the devastation the pine park beetle has created in the forests in the Rockies and widespread vector-born illnesses such as the West Nile virus as two examples of very visible and local global warming stories. “This story is getting
less political all the time,” she said. “The science is just pouring in and is very conclusive.”That doesn’t mean that U.S. newspapers and TV newsrooms are clamoring to cover climate change on a regular basis. The perception is that global warming is still a difficult, depressing story that people don’t want to hear, which makes news directors hesitant to assign it.“It’s bad news and makes people feel powerless,” said George, “and it remains political because the solution is political. There are still a lot of downsides to doing this story.”ABC News correspondent Bill Blakemore notes that global warming is a
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