The Pareto distribution arising from ideological fervor, intentional propaganda, and economic necessity creates its own deception

From Climate Journalism is Broken by Roger Pielke, Jr. The subheading is A new paper reveals troubling biases.  

In 2020, scholars published more than 50,000 peer-reviewed papers on climate change in almost 6,000 journals. A new study by Marie-Elodie Perga and colleagues looks at how these papers were covered by news media and reveals some profound biases in coverage of climate. There are still some excellent journalists providing good coverage of climate, of course, but the overall patterns are troubling.

Let’s take a look at the numbers.

Of the 51,230 peer-reviewed papers on climate change published in 2020, Perga and colleagues found that only about 9% of them saw any media coverage, defined as a single mention in the paper’s Altimetric score. About 2%, or ~1,000 papers, saw more than 20 mentions in the media. These “mediatized” papers are the focus of Perga’s paper.

The 2% of papers most covered by the media are disproportionately focused:

at the global and continental scales;

on the end of the 21st century;

on the natural sciences and health;

and come primarily from just 6 journals (3 from Science journals, 2 from Nature and PNAS).

I looked at their dataset and — as we might expect — RCP8.5 features prominently in many of the papers receiving the most media attention in 2020, including 4 of the top 5 most covered papers.

The biases are large. The paper reports that:

Overall, 56% of the top-100 mediatized papers on natural science report rate or magnitude of climate-driven changes at continental or global scales (40% being projections by the end-of-the-century), while those represent only 4% of the random paperset.

Reporting disproportionately deemphasized studies in the social and political sciences, economics, technology, engineering, energy and agriculture — these are all topics related to what might be done on climate change.

The authors conclude that as a result of these biases, news coverage is biased and the public is misinformed:

Thereby, a few articles get a lot of news mentions, limiting the diversity of information to which readers are exposed (Ortega, 2021). The selective sourcing of news media for high-profile journals and strong degree of co-mention in news outlets thereby come with a loss of disciplinary diversity of the research brought to public’s attention, with over-emphasis on natural science and health, while research findings produced on the social, economic, technological and energy-related aspects of climate change are curtailed back through the mediatization process. The selectivity is even found within the dominant natural science. Mediatized scientific publications are selectively concentrated on the worldwide magnitude of the current consequences of climate change, and projected risks by the end of the century for natural Earth components.

My immediate response is a knee-jerk - "This is a Pareto distribution issue."  It is common in all social sciences to witness a small element responsible for a disproportionate outcome.  The stylized example is 20% of criminals are responsible for 80% of all crimes committed.

As mainstream media have lost revenue to support research or even minimal fact-checking, it would be easy to leap to the conclusion that there is nothing going on other than uninformed journalists, reaching for the most provocative papers and producing the Pareto sorts of distribution seen in this study.

But then Pielke introduces an additional fact which calls that into question.  An earlier study more than a decade ago did not have the Pareto distribution now seen.

Climate journalism wasn’t always dominated by an advocacy agenda. More than a decade ago, I along with colleagues Ursula Rick and Max Boykoff evaluated 20 years of media coverage of sea level rise. We found overall media reporting on sea level rise to be highly consistent with the scientific literature and the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, summarized in the figures below.

[snip]

We concluded, “accurate reporting on projections for sea level rise by 2100 demonstrates a bright spot at the interface of climate science and mass media.”

What has changed? I can think of a number of things:

Journalism itself has changed dramatically, with resources for reporting shrinking;

Reporting has shifted emphasis from news to opinion;

Niche reporting tailored to reader interests has increased;

Climate advocacy has increasingly focused on promoting extreme weather as climate change.

All of this favors what we might call reporting from the keyboard on climate, which would favor utilizing press releases from universities that promote studies in the top 6 journals, focused on projections of climate to 2100 at national or global scales, and linked to the event that just happened. Add in an advocacy orientation and we have the current climate beat — The stories, they write themselves.

I have posted with some frequency about press release journalism as an expected economic consequence of plummeting revenues in the mainstream media.  Regrettably it is not in constant dollars but it gives you an idea about how dependent MSM are for the cheapness of stories.  Opinions and regurgitating press releases are a cheap source of content.  

Click to enlarge.

Ideological fervor, intentional propaganda, combined with innumeracy and economic necessity probably account for the appearance of Pareto law in today's results rather than any such natural distribution.