A Conversation With: Elizabeth Arnold
“We need to ‘shine the light’ on ways out of problems too. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
“These people…are the least likely to contribute to climate change. They are the most affected right now,” Elizabeth Arnold says in a darkened auditorium. She’s giving a TEDx Talk in Seattle, Washington. Portraits of people that call the Arctic Circle home are shown on the screen behind her. She’s sharing her experiences of spending time with each, explaining how they live their lives in such a remote place. Then she pivots, because how these individuals live their lives and the troubles they are facing because of climate change aren’t in isolation. “You may not harvest seals or pick berries for your daily dose of vitamin C,” she says, “but the consequences of what’s happening in the Arctic — we will feel. It’s ridiculous to think that the change we are driving ourselves, isn’t going to affect us.”
With a journalism career that spans beyond twenty years, Elizabeth Arnold isn’t concerned with being the first person to tell the story. She’s concerned with telling the right story — the story that explains what’s happening and why it matters to the reader. She’s worked both in local journalism throughout Alaska as well as a national and international correspondent for National Public Radio. After a career of covering stories across a range of topics from presidential campaigns to snow leopards to the types of shoes Supreme Court justices wear, she returned to Alaska to teach journalism at the University of Alaska while concurrently working on Arctic Profiles — an environmental reporting project that profiles people from Beringia and the solutions-focused work their doing to combat the impacts of climate change.
Earlier this year, Arnold spent time at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center as a Joan Shorenstein fellow where she focused her work on researching and examining the role of the media in talking about climate change. In her recently published paper Doom and Gloom: The Role of the Media in Public Disengagement on Climate Change, Arnold makes a poignant argument for the need to consider a solutions journalism approach to climate change reporting — in order to include the public in the conversation, rather than leaving them feeling powerless and unable to act.
Leslie Cory (LC): I’ve been able to read a bit about your background in journalism, but can you walk me through how you went from commercial salmon fishing to reporting on environmental and political stories? Why journalism?
Elizabeth Arnold (EA): I was fishing salmon to pay off my student loans. In the winters, I worked for a newspaper in the Bush (Yukon Kuskokwim Delta) The Tundra Drums, and for commercial fishing journals (Alaska Fisherman’s Journal, National Fisherman, Pacific Fishing). Finally, I landed a full-time job in Juneau as a reporter for public radio (KTOO-FM) where I worked for about six years filing stories for statewide news programs. NPR started taking my stories and offered me a month-long residency in DC. The day I arrived (March 24th 1989), the Exxon Valdez slammed into Bligh Reef and spilled 10.8 million gallons into Prince William Sound. All I wanted to do was fly home and cover it, but NPR convinced me to stay and report from DC. The next day I was sent to the White House to cover a press conference by President Bush (GHW) and the Alaska delegation. It was trial by fire, for sure. Over the following weeks and months, I covered the congressional hearings and ended up as NPR’s Congressional Correspondent (along with Mara). I covered politics for NPR for many years but always had an interest in natural resource reporting and when I was finding myself getting cynical about yet another presidential campaign, I made the move West for NPR. I covered environmental issues for a few years but kept getting pulled back up to Alaska, where my heart has always been.
I learned to tell stories from my father. He was a salesman by day and frustrated cartoonist by night. He was self-taught and I grew up reading the books he gave me, Jimmy Breslin, Ring Lardner, John McPhee, Theodore White, David Halberstam, Michael Herr, Neil Sheehan, Tom Wolfe… probably not appropriate reading for a teenage girl but these guys pulled me into journalism because they were such great observers. I think what they all shared was the ability to tell a huge, powerful, complex story through a telling detail or character. While everybody else was attempting the impossible task of covering JFK’s assassination, Breslin had breakfast with the gravedigger. I’ve been trying to do that my whole career. I’ve never been a “scoop” kind of journalist, but rather, have always tried to inform in the most compelling and understandable way possible.
LC: You make an argument in your resent research paper for being a proponent of solutions journalism. Why?
EA: It’s pretty simple. I don’t think “shining the light,” or “bearing witness” or every other cliché about journalism is enough, especially when most of today’s reporting centers on complex problems. We need to “shine the light” on ways out of problems too. Otherwise, what’s the point?
LC: As someone that has seen the impacts of climate change, oftentimes through the eyes of impacted communities, what drives you to stick around to find the people working on the solutions?
EA: As a whaling captain in Savoonga said, “Moping is not a survival skill.” There wouldn’t be people in the Arctic if they weren’t good at figuring out how to adapt to wrenching cultural and environmental change. It’s been happening for hundreds of years. To me, the story of how a community is converting to wind-diesel energy, or moving to higher ground, or figuring out new ways to fish; that’s more interesting than the latest sea ice measurements. It’s also a much more useful story to tell someone in New Jersey for example, who has no clue about the Arctic, but just might be inspired by what’s happening here.
LC: Is there a danger in not practicing solutions journalism?
EA: Researching my paper was a way for me to verify my gut feeling that a steady diet of gloom and doom stories about climate change was turning people off. It seems obvious but I wanted to back it up from my corner of the world, which is experiencing climate change directly every day. Audiences are tuning these kinds of stories out and that is the danger in this constant repetition of superlatives…warmest year, least amount of sea ice, worst fishing season, etc.
Without any semblance of possibility, the whole story is not being told, and that’s the journalist’s job…to tell the complete story, even if it doesn’t fit the prevailing narrative. Mitigation and adaptation are underreported. People are responding…here is how they are responding. Here’s what’s working.
LC: What is journalism’s role in climate change? Does it have one besides just being the messenger?
EA: Our role is to tell a complete story. Warming temperatures, sea ice measurements and eroding coastlines are dominating the headlines. We should be telling stories about individuals and communities that are responding in all kinds of different ways. By response I mean both mitigation and adaptation strategies.
There is a fear, I think, among journalists that if we do a story on a specific response for example, that we are championing that response, picking a winner. But I think that’s easily addressed. Follow-up. Is it working? What else might work better? What are the downsides? Who is doing it better? What can be improved and how?
LC: Where did the idea for your recent paper come from? Was there a certain moment when you realized the need to investigate the dangers associated with a national media focused on the doom and gloom of climate change?
EA: I read a story in a reputable national publication about Newtok, ten years after I had done a similar story about this same community and its need to relocate. There was nothing in the story at all about what the people had been trying to do to move to higher ground, nothing. It was pure hype and it treated the community like canaries in the coal mine.
LC: What was the most surprising thing you discovered while doing your investigative research for this paper?
EA: I was surprised to learn just how many academics study journalism. I was even more surprised to learn how many academics study how journalists cover climate change. But I was most surprised to learn that there are actually anthropologists who are studying the effects of anthropologists going into rural communities to interview people about climate change. To do so, they are going into rural communities to interview people about how they feel about being interviewed about climate change. It is beyond ridiculous.
LC: You make a strong point about traditional media and the balance of bias. Can you talk a bit about how to avoid the need for equivalence in coverage while still being an objective reporter?
EA: I think reputable journalists and organizations have largely self-corrected from the practice of false balance in the coverage of climate change. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to hear the little voice in your head about going the extra mile to seek other opinions, that’s always a good thing. It’s important to understand all points of view. In the end, it’s about fairness and accuracy.
LC: “If it bleeds it leads” has been a longstanding cliché for news headlines. How should news organizations go about shifting that language and gaining buy-in from those concerned about negatively impacting ratings with a change?
EA: With so many outlets for news, the argument that being first with a breaking story is going to get the most eyeballs or listeners just gets weaker by the day.
I think that what sets a journalist or an organization apart these days is not being first with the most terrifying headline, but what we used to call the “second-day” story. It was called the second-day story because it was the more thoughtful, alternative take on the breaking story because the journalist didn’t have to turn it around so fast. Stories that require in-depth, investigative reporting, with actual follow-through and follow-up, stand apart. Why would a given network’s ratings outpace another if it’s doing the same breaking story only slightly better? The same goes for print and radio.
LC: You reference a study by Boykoff et al that “concluded that problems caused by climate change were deemed more newsworthy than solutions, and that coverage was fueling a sense of hopelessness.” Can you talk a bit about the ethical implications of this? Is there a need to consider how reporting can psychologically impact the audience?
EA: I don’t think the role of the journalist is to worry too much about the psychological impacts of every given story. There are exceptions for sure…the coverage of suicide for example, which I devote several classes to in my ethics course. That said, I think we as a profession should take a look at the cumulative impacts of coverage, especially coverage that has taken on a similar form. That’s why I researched this paper. My hunch, which had already been borne out by many academics like Boykoff, was that the gloom-and-doom narrative was turning people off. I’m not sure we journalists spend much time reading some of the studies people like Boycoff do about our profession. As I said, there’s a lot of it out there! It’s worth taking a hard look at.
More specifically, I think a journalist going into a remote community to do a story on the effects of climate change should see what’s already been written or produced and not just assume they are the first, or that whatever has already been put out there doesn’t matter. I think a journalist should think about how many times a subject has been asked the same question by others and how that might skew a response, or how that might make the subject feel, or an entire community for that matter. So, both from a micro and a macro level, I think a journalist needs to think about the consequences of the act of reporting and the potential repercussions of the actual report.
LC: Do you think that there is a fear that presenting solutions could make an audience complacent? As in, there are already people working on that, I don’t need to change my behavior. If so, what can be done differently about reporting to reduce the complacency?
EA: Wow, I just don’t think there’s even close to enough solutions reporting out there to even begin to start the handwringing about complacency. There will always be people out there who are happy to let others do for them, but for every one of them, I think there’s probably twenty people who will be inspired either by hearing about a solution or the very fact that someone or an entire community is engaged in a solution.
LC: Based on your research on trends in reporting on Alaska, part of the problem is not including voices of those actually living the lives being reported on. Why is there such an insistence on going to the experts instead of the residents?
EA: Simple, it’s easier. Many reporters tend to get sources from other reporters. Many reporters would much rather talk to an expert who is used to being interviewed, than go out into the field and have to explain to a very real person, who they are, what they are doing and ask them if they would be willing to be interviewed. It’s hard work and it’s not for everyone. I have first-year students who turn in stories without a single quote. When I call them on it, their next story usually has quotes from someone they know, like a family member or friend (!). Talking to strangers isn’t easy. Talking to strangers who live a life very different from your own is even more difficult. I don’t think we prepare journalists enough for the realities of actual reporting. We spend so much time teaching big data skills, social media savvy, etc. I teach a communication workshop for scientists who are going to do research in the Arctic. I think the most valuable stuff they learn in the course is about respect. You can’t just show up in a remote village and expect people to line up and answer your questions and then get on a plane and leave.
LC: How do we shift the language being used to describe communities from victim to community member (or even simply human)?
EA: I think that goes back to an earlier question you asked about impacts. I think journalists get caught up in the “shine the light” part of the mission and forget about why they are supposedly shining the light in the first place. If the reason we are doing this job is to create an informed society, then simply labeling community members as victims with a hyped story and moving on to the next misses the point entirely. Sticking around, seeing what’s really going on, finding out who’s making things work there or someplace else and following up is telling a more complete story that might truly inform. In so doing, you will be treating the community members with respect, as humans, not as “examples” of the consequences of climate change. “Climate refugees,” is insulting.
LC: Do you think there’s a fear to not fit into the typical pattern of news coverage, and that could be a reason we see few solutions journalism examples?
EA: Yes, of course, and I think that goes all the way up to the top. Publishers, managing editors, editors, reporters. Traditional newsrooms are afraid of anything that smacks of advocacy. I think SJ has answered that argument well, but that doesn’t mean you’ve won. Pitching a story about a person, place or organization that has figured something out or is in the process of figuring something out is difficult because the editor is immediately worried that somehow that invests the news organization in the solution.
LC: What does “The Whole Story” mean to you?
EA: At the very basic level, if you’re covering Congress, it’s easy to do a quick and dirty story about pending legislation. You get an inflammatory quote from one side and an inflammatory quote from the other side, say the bill is controversial and call it a day. That’s lazy journalism and it’s rampant. How have you informed anyone? If you actually cover what’s in the bill, what it’s about, who it might affect and where there is or isn’t common ground, you’ve actually given someone listening, watching or reading, enough information to think about it and even weigh in during the debate.
The same thing goes for other kinds of reporting. If you’re going into a community to cover an environmental problem, for example, it means spending time with people involved and those on the sidelines, looking at what’s working and isn’t working, and sticking around long enough to be able to tell the story in a fair, comprehensive and compelling way. Most importantly, it means following up. Follow-up is often overlooked, sometimes intentionally. Following up means facing the people you wrote about after the fact. At the national level, it’s just so easy to drop in, report and move on. Follow-up stories are some of the best reporting out there.
LC: How can journalists check themselves when reporting to make sure they’re telling the whole story? Are there questions they should be asking themselves before filing their piece?
EA: Is what I’m reporting actually informing society so that people can make good choices, or am I just hyping or documenting something to fill space or get on the air? Seriously. That’s a very real and basic question that reporters don’t ask themselves enough. Beyond that, what does the audience really need to know to understand this story in a more complete way? Have I provided context? Have I gone the extra mile to answer the logical questions someone might ask after hearing, watching or reading this story?
For example, I just told you that it’s the hottest year on record. So, what? So, I scared the heck out of a few concerned people, raised a few eyebrows and made some climate deniers more entrenched. What have I really accomplished besides filling up some airtime and repeating what every other news organization is running?
Are you a journalist who wants to learn how to do solutions journalism? All the tools you need can be found in the SJN Learning Lab.
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