John Daley is television reporter in Salt Lake City, specializing in political, environmental and investigative coverage.  He also teaches journalism at the University of Utah, and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. His essay is based on a train ride with his family from his hometown of Denver to his current home in Salt Lake, entitled Zephyr to Zion—Train of Thoughts in a Warming West.

“….As the train rumbles into the dark canyon shade, the layer-cake walls towering high above now, I wonder: how many of the hundreds of people on this train really understand the changes we’re seeing right out our window and what’s surely responsible for it? If they’re like most Americans, they’re actually increasingly skeptical about the reality of global warming, according to the latest Gallup poll (2009). It found that 41 percent of those polled believe the threat of climate change is exaggerated.

That’s an amazing statistic when you consider this: many of the scientists, the people who’ve been spending years now documenting what must be one of the most thoroughly studied phenomena in history, are more worried than ever. One study released this year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, predicted dust bowl–like conditions in the Southwest and elsewhere, which would be “largely irreversible” for a thousand years if we continue burning carbon at our current pace. Another, by the British Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, declared that Antarctic ice sheets are melting faster and across a larger area than previously thought. The head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that the current trajectory of climate change is now much worse than originally projected.

How can it be that public opinion lags so far behind reality? Here’s my perspective: the nosedive of the journalism world is directly undermining the quality and quantity of climate-related information US citizens consume. Consider the findings of the 2009 State of the News Media report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report found that the journalism world, like the financial sector, is in a meltdown. The global economic downturn is hammering the very advertisers that fund most news outlets…..”