Old, New Media Cultures Illustrated
In Coverage of NASA's Hansen in Houston

By Bill Dawson

The interplay of old and new media forms and practices is demonstrated in coverage of a much-publicized address that NASA's James Hansen, the nation's best-known climate scientist, delivered recently in Houston.

In the Houston Chronicle, that blending of old and new approaches was especially evident.

Eric Berger, Chronicle science writer, solicited questions from readers of his SciGuy blog, and used several of them when he interviewed Hansen.

The climatologist's response to one reader-suggested question provided the story's lead.

A recording of the entire interview was posted as a podcast on the SciGuy blog, and along with the news story, it prompted a torrent of additional commentary over ensuing weeks by blog-reading regulars.

The Chronicle's coverage also included an editorial that positively discussed Hansen's advice against building new coal-fired power plants, his relative unconcern about use of oil and gas, and his warnings that climate feedback systems might trigger "an uncontrollable warming cycle."

Three local broadcast outlets - the local affiliate stations of the PBS and NPR networks and a radio station in the left-leaning Pacifica network - also interviewed Hansen.

The Pacifica station's 13-minute interview consisted of friendly questions. The PBS station's interview, conducted for a local program syndicated in more than 80 cities, is scheduled to air in February. An official of the NPR affiliate said its interview may be included in a future feature story on global warming.

All told, the attention that Hansen got from the Houston media was extensive enough to please his visit's sponsor.

"I was ecstatic about the coverage," said Randall Morton, founder and president of The Progressive Forum, a two-year-old speaker series in Houston that has presented environmentally themed talks by activist attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., former Vice President Al Gore, and Australian climate author Tim Flannery along with other speeches.

"We hit the jackpot with the Chronicle editorial - not just its opinions, but its good reporting," said Morton, owner of an advertising/PR firm that mainly serves oil equipment companies.

Berger's reporting on Hansen's visit to Houston began with an entry on his SciGuy blog on October 22, two days before Hansen's Progressive Forum address. The headline: "Jim Hansen's coming to Houston. Got questions?" The podcast of the 35-minute interview on October 24, which was conducted before Hansen's speech that evening, was posted as an update to the blog entry soliciting interview suggestions.

The science reporter's first question to Hansen was political - about an allegation that he had been "funded" handsomely by liberal billionaire George Soros, a favorite target of conservative commentators. The charge originated in an Investor's Business Daily editorial a month earlier, then was amplified by conservative bloggers, blog readers and commentators. The allegation was the subject of a detailed debunking by environmental reporter Robert McClure of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in a September 28 blog item: "The (Soros-Hansen) story's completely wrong," McClure wrote. "No wonder bloggers are getting such a bad reputation for accuracy."

In response to Berger's question, Hansen denied the Soros allegation, saying it was "nonsense" and the work of "swift-boaters." Nothing on the subject appeared in Berger's subsequent news story.

Berger next posed six questions of his own, seeking Hansen's views on topics that included geoengineering proposals for dealing with climate change, the news story breaking that day about White House editing of congressional testimony by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and how best to achieve consensus on tackling the climate issue with rapidly developing India and China.

Next came questions from blog readers, both from skeptics about man-made global warming (has it been "over-hyped in some quarters?") and Hansen fans (including one who wanted to know if he would run for office - "absolutely not," he answered).

One reader question touched on Texas' status as the state with the largest emissions of carbon dioxide. Hansen - adept in the Chronicle and Pacifica station interviews at responding to questions with points he later made in his speech - answered that Texas was "in the line of fire for double-barreled climate impacts" from floods and droughts.

The remark became the lead in Berger's story in the next day's newspaper. That paragraph and the next three were on the climate-change risks faced by the state. The next paragraph provided biographical details about Hansen, including his complaints in 2005-06 about NASA officials' meddling with his public statements. Then came five paragraphs on the CDC story and Hansen's reaction - "The (federal) public affairs offices have become offices of propaganda." Additional paragraphs in Berger's story dealt with Hansen's policy recommendations, including a moratorium on new coal plants, and his response to a reader question about possible links between recent California wildfires and the 2005 hurricane season to global warming.

Berger, the Chronicle science reporter since 2001 and also its science blogger since 2005, responded to questions from The Yale Forum about his treatment of Hansen's visit and how it related to his broader reporting and blogging on climate change.*

He said the decision to lead the article with Hansen's interview comments about Texas climate impacts, rather than with the CDC controversy, hinged on a desire to get more prominent display for the story in the print edition.

If the lead had been Hansen's reaction to the CDC news, the interview story would have run as a sidebar to a wire story about the CDC testimony, he said - inside the A section. Leading with the drought-flood comment earned it a place on the front page of the B (City-State) section, he said.

Berger said soliciting and using reader questions is something he has done before, as in his earlier interview with Flannery. "It gives Joe Public a shot at a question," he said. "I'm always looking for ways to connect with people who read the blog."

Global warming elicits more reader participation than any other topic addressed on the blog, said Berger, whose blog duties now occupy about a third of his working hours.

"Of all the stuff I write about, it's probably the most political, it divides people," he said.

Many blog comments are by global warming skeptics, but other readers argue forcefully with them in support of the credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC. Two of the latter group live in Scotland and California, Berger said.

The online blog signature of another regular participant links to the Texas A&M University web page of Dr. John W. Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist. Berger used a question suggested by Nielsen-Gammon in his Hansen interview: "When you disagree with the IPCC, should governments formulate policy based on the IPCC's conclusions or based on yours? If yours, why yours rather than somebody else's?" Hansen said his main "disagreement" with the IPCC was actually "a difference in what we're talking about" - the IPCC's exclusion of newer data on sea-level rise in its 2007 reports.

Another scientist who occasionally took part in the SciGuy blog forum is Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M. Berger said Dessler would post comments that were "almost Hansen-like," and more political than Nielsen-Gammon's, but was "bushwhacked" so many times by skeptics that he moved his online commentary to his own blog at Grist, the online environmental magazine.

The number of SciGuy blog readers who participate in its online forum might appear to be impressively large from just a glance at the discussion after Berger solicited questions for Hansen, the interview podcast, and then publication of the interview article. From October 22, when Berger's issued his call for questions, until November 7, when comments finally ended, there were 273 posts.

A closer look, however, reveals that most of the comments were posted by just a few people. Out of the total of 273, for instance, 96 comments came from the admirer of Hansen who had asked if he might seek elective office. A couple of global warming skeptics who likewise suggested questions (one of which was used in the interview - why Hansen believed his "apocalyptic predictions" were more credible than others that have failed to come true), posted 41 and 25 comments respectively.

Playing his forum moderator role, Berger wearily tried to rein in the often-snarky exchanges between pro- and anti-Hansen bloggers at one point: "Please, let's keep the political commentary to a minimum. Republicans don't like Democrats, and Democrats don't like Republicans. I get it."

A few minutes later, a blog reader annoyed by the repetitive debate delivered this pithy critique: "Same six guys having the same three arguments over and over and over again ... But then, that's the steady state of just about any online forum, isn't it?"

Berger replied to this reader: "I hear you. I am presently working behind the scenes to increase the diversity of participation here. As part of that we need to do a better job of staying on topic."

Berger, who holds a degree in astronomy from The University of Texas at Austin, told The Yale Forum that he was referring to his continuing effort to enlist "a wider network of scientists" to regularly comment in the blog forum on various topics.

Acknowledging that the climate issue in particular generates "a lot of heat" in the forum now, he said he hopes, with more scientists participating, to create an online venue "where scientists and interested lay people can meet in a non-threatening place and discuss."

But Berger's efforts to find a Texas scientist who was both skeptical about anthropogenic climate change and willing to debate Dessler earlier this year proved difficult.

"The participant had to be a geologist, climate scientist, or someone whose research was at least tangentially related to global warming," Berger told his blog readers on November 20. "I couldn't find one. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of such scientists in Texas who would be willing to argue in favor of the IPCC report's general conclusions about man's role in global warming."

Such is the daily life of a newspaper journalist who is both blogger and conventional beat reporter at a time when the two roles can complement, but also complicate, each other.

AUTHOR

Bill Dawson from 1984 to 2001 covered environmental issues for The Houston Chronicle. He now freelances and teaches at Rice University. Contact him at bill@yaleclimatemediaforum.org

EDITOR'S NOTE

As a former Chronicle environmental reporter, Dawson earlier was a colleague of Berger's at the newspaper.