Media Matters for America

[Commentary] In the last two weeks, which include the media's meltdown over FBI Director James Comey’s unprecedented decision to insert the bureau into the election process, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News set aside a total of 25 minutes to cover the e-mails. That compares to their grand total of three minutes for covering policy during that span. For the entire 2016 year, however, the networks have devoted zero minutes to in-depth policy discussions of climate change, drugs, poverty, guns, infrastructure, social injustice, or the deficit. But they dedicated 125 minutes to Clinton e-mails.

What’s been utterly depressing is the collective decision to relentlessly cover a story that had already been beaten to death nine different times and from every conceivable angle. That and the fact that lazy email mania bumped aside actual, important news that Americans deserve to know about.

[Commentary] Overall, think about how irresponsibly the press has handled the truly never-ending Hillary Clinton e-mail saga, and then ask yourself this: If the Democratic nominee already had lingering doubts about the press’ fairness, would the media’s performance in recent days have done anything to allay those fears? The press for years has fixated on Hillary Clinton’s relationship with the press, and specifically the idea that Hillary Clinton doesn’t like the press or trust the press, and that’s what accounts for the “famous Clinton secrecy.” As I’ve noted in the past, reporters can rarely point to any concrete evidence that Clinton disdains journalists. And with the arrival of Donald Trump’s campaign, in which the Republican regularly smears, taunts, and attacks journalists, the anti-press claim about Clinton came to be viewed as rather quaint in comparison. But it’s possible that over her 20-plus years on the national stage and having seen out-of-control “scandal” coverage up close, she maintains a certain level of well-earned distrust.

The media’s ongoing e-mail coverage since 2015 has likely done little to alter that, and especially the off-kilter and overblown FBI Director Comey coverage in recent days. Having invested thousands of hours covering the e-mail story over the last year-and-a-half, a story that has produced no criminal charges (but has produced hollow congressional hearings), the press still remains fully committed to pretending it’s a Very Big Scandal, which explained the unfettered caterwauling following the FBI news. So yes, maybe that’s one reason Clinton might distrust the press.

Two Media Matters analyses suggest that over 85 percent of those quoted in the media about climate change are men. Several top women in the field denounced this disparity, noting that women will be disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change.

A review of a recent Media Matters analysis of print and television coverage of the United Nations climate reports found that women made up less than 15 percent of interviewees.

A look back at our analysis of broadcast coverage of climate change unearthed the same stark disparity: less than 14 percent of those quoted on the nightly news shows and Sunday shows in 2013 were women. Media Matters has previously found that women make up only about a quarter of guests on the Sunday morning talk shows and weekday evening cable news segments on the economy.

However, the gender gap on climate change conversations is even starker. One contributing factor may be that the climate sciences have experienced a "female brain drain," according to Scientific American, as have many other scientific fields. This "female brain drain" is also evident in the largely male leadership of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.