Why Is the Media Afraid to Tackle Livestock's Role in Climate Change?

As the world gears up for the climate talks in Copenhagen next month, the mainstream media is overlooking one important climate change contributor, and it isn’t coal or cars.

Three years ago, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations released a lengthy report entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” Among the plethora of environmental problems the livestock industry is accused of contributing to — water pollution, habit fragmentation and desertification of arable land among them — climate change figured prominently.

In particular, the report concluded that livestock production accounts for 18%, or one-fifth, of global emissions. This figure is higher than all transportation sources combined.

In coming up with this figure, the FAO considered the full life cycle of livestock production. It didn’t only calculate enteric emissions, the methane and nitrous oxide from the belching, flatulence and defecation of the animals that has made the topic the butt of jokes by both pundits and the public. It also figured in external carbon emissions that occur in livestock production. This included on-farm energy use, the transportation of livestock feed, waste and goods, and tropical deforestation. The latter is the most notorious factor, as at least 70 percent of Amazon clear cutting is due to producing makeshift pasture for cattle grazing or to grow soy to be shipped overseas to confinement feedlots. Deforestation of the Amazon contributes to approximately 22 percent of annual emissions.

Does this sound familiar? It would make sense if it didn’t to people who rely on the mainstream media for news.

Last year, the Center for a Livable Future of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released a report detailing the results of a two and a half year study of media coverage of agriculture in the context of climate change. The study reviewed 16 major daily newspapers in the United States, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today. Specifically, the researchers searched for the key words “food,” “farm” or “agriculture” in any articles that contained the terms “climate change” or “global warming” in their lead paragraphs.

Of the 4,582 climate change articles surveyed, only 109 (or 2.4 percent), included one or more of the key phrases, with only 20 of those articles explicitly focused on the subject of food or agriculture as related to climate change. The remainder of the 109 articles contained only brief mentions, and only 13 percent containing any mention of “livestock.”

Roni Neff, the Research and Policy Director of the Center for a Livable Future and the lead author of the study, says she has noticed a slight uptick in reporting on agriculture’s role in climate change since the report was published but only slight.

This leads to the question: Why has such an important contributor to climate change received such paltry coverage?

Neff, notes that diet is generally considered a more personal aspect of behavior as opposed to others such as driving habits. This makes it a challenge in prompting media professionals to tackle the topic.

“The fact is that we as a society tend to view it as strictly an individual choice with no bearing on how it affects larger society, and how larger social forces affect our eating, and so it's not considered newsworthy,” says Neff.

Neff also contends that media oversight of this topic may be partially due to what she deems “CO2 bias” among journalists. Since awareness of the significance of the food’s influence on climate occurred in the scientific community later in comparison to other factors, the topic may be undergoing a lag time before the media catches on as it did with climate change in general.