Wait a minute, aren't liberals supposed to control the media? Well they're not doing their jobs, then, because climate change has been sliding slowly off the radar at major newspapers and magazines. That graph above shows coverage on a steady down slope since 2007, with a bump in 2009 because it's hard to slaver about "Climategate" without mentioning climate change.
Last year at least 7,140 journalists and opinion writers published some 19,000 stories on climate change, compared to more than 11,100 reporters who filed 32,400 stories in 2009, according to DailyClimate.org.
The decline was seen across almost all benchmarks measured by the news service: 20 percent fewer reporters covered the issue in 2011 than in 2010, 20 percent fewer outlets published stories, and the most prolific reporters on the climate change beat published 20 percent fewer stories.
Particularly noticeable was the silence from the nation's editorial boards: In 2009, newspapers published 1,229 editorials on the topic. Last year, they published less than 580 – half as many, according to DailyClimate.org's archives.
Climate change reporting in Australia, which passed a carbon tax plan in 2011, increased between 21 and 60 percent. But pretty much every other news source was down on pretty much every measure of coverage quantity.
