Climate Change & Catastrophe:

The Mediated Divisions

CLIMATE CHANGE & CATASTROPHE:

MEDIATED LOCAL AND NATIONAL DIVISIONS

ON THE 2016 LOUISIANA FLOODS

Flooding in Baton Rouge suburb, Denham Springs. (Patrick Dennis / The Advocate)

Katie Johnsen

Global Environmental Media

Professor Kokas

December 7, 2016

I. Introduction

Climate change, a major change in global climate patterns over a sustained period of time, is an environmental phenomenon distinguished from many others in the breadth and scope of its consequence. Although it manifests itself in bursts and surges on the local scale, the long-term implications are certainly far-reaching and global. [footnoteRef:1] Despite this, there exists a widespread discord on the issue itself, both within the United States and around the world – on the degree of its importance and what, if anything, should be done about it. Our experience with the natural world is by definition local, in that our engagement with the environment is dictated by the geography that is within our reach. We are restricted in our experience to what our five senses can provide within a given space. It is therefore common sense that people living in different regions of the world will interact with their environments in different, distinct ways – precisely because the immediate environment with which they interact is different and distinct itself. Media, as the conduits through which information passes – from one to many in the traditional sense – serve as the bridge between this first-hand experience of the few and the second-hand knowledge of the many. With environmental issues especially, media play an integral role in the communication of an event or concept that was not witnessed personally by the recipient. [1: “Climate Change: Basic Information,” US Environmental Protection Agency.]

To investigate the particular landscape of environmental issues in the media and the unique relationship between lived experience and perceived knowledge, this paper will explore the both lived and mediated event of the unusual storm and resulting floods that devastated parts of Louisiana in August of this year. In considering this natural disaster – experienced directly by a specific geographic group, yet broadcast widely across the country – I hope to probe the difference in local mediated response and national mediated response, specifically in regard to the topic of climate change. Certainly a controversial issue, our understanding of climate change is firm in some respects and ambiguous in others. Different groups across the nation have become polarized on the issue; some questioning its relevance, some doubting its causes (and therefore solutions), some finding it to be relevant, and some finding it of the utmost importance. All this, spiraling out from a singular body of scientific facts, from an unequivocal scientific consensus on the issue—that is, the earth is warming and humans are contributing to it.[footnoteRef:2] How has this fixed baseline of information inspired such diverse and impassioned responses? Many point to the media – those responsible for disseminating this information. As the passage through which information and knowledge pass to large audiences, media’s outlet biases or political-leanings might shape the message that is eventually received, and perhaps the opinion that is eventually formed. [2: Cook, John et al. “Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming.” Environmental Research Letters, vol. 11, issue 4, 2016.]

The people contributing to, and consuming, local media reports are transmitting and receiving information about first-hand experience. The people contributing to, and consuming, national media, however, are a much broader and diverse group – whose knowledge of these distant events flows from mediated information, not lived experience. Within the lens of the environment and climate change, this distinction is magnified, as such environmental traumas, by definition, affect localized regions and particular groups rather than entire nations. More so, the local is inclined to treat the subject matter with more intimacy, where the national is poised to treat it with more distance. The local Louisianans, of course, have been touched – blustered and bruised – by the rising water in their neighborhoods and backyards. The rest of the world, however, has simply seen the images on TV, heard the reports on the radio, and read the articles in the post – they know of the events, but they do not know them personally. The events have not touched their lives.

I am interested in how these groups form their opinions, and whether a first-hand encounter with environmental disaster is might influence the ways in which its causes are discussed. Several scientific studies published in the wake of the flood strongly suggest a link between the Earth’s rising temperatures and an increase in the volume and frequency of damaging downpours, especially along the coast – one in particular considers this storm specifically.[footnoteRef:3] Does proximity to a natural catastrophe, such as this one, push communities towards a further awareness or acceptance of climate change? Will the first-hand, subjective, experience of affected Louisianans translate into a more urgent, pressing, or aggressive coverage of the floods in connection to climate change? Will the geographic and emotional distance of national publications impact the way in which they interpret the storm’s connection with climate change? Or, might the political leanings of given publications overpower local experience? Rather than polling the media’s influence on public opinion, I poll community perspective through the media they produce and consume. That is, I study the way in which this message is packaged by media institutions and delivered to local consumers. [3: World Weather Attribution & NOAA. “Louisiana Downpours, August 2016,” Climate Central. September, 2016.]

Bolstered and supported by relevant scholarly texts discussing climate change in the media, I consider articles published in the week following August, 14, 2016 – the first day of the storm – in both national and local publications that discuss the Louisiana floods. Locally, I look to The (New Orleans) Times Picayune and The (Baton Rouge) Advocate ; New Orleans being Louisiana’s cultural capital and Baton Rouge being the state capital and one of the hardest hit regions. Nationally, I explore The New York Times and The Washington Post. I only consider articles both written and published by the host publication – re-published articles from the Associated Press or Reuters, for example, are excluded from this study. My primary task is to isolate articles that link the unusual and largely unprecedented storm to larger concerns of climate change and unpack each publication’s treatment of the subject. How did they explain the looming “why?” or did they even try? This method should offer insight into the influence that lived experience, in regard to environmental issues, has on media coverage and willingness to acknowledge climate change.

II. My Claim

Embarking on this study, I expected to find that local media, due to their direct implication in the fallout of the storm, would demonstrate a more pressing attention to the causes of this unexpected and devastating catastrophe – looking to all avenues, including scientific, for answers. What I found, however, challenged this notion. My investigation showed that while local publications published a greater volume of articles about the Louisiana Floods than their national counterparts, they were less likely to discuss climate change in conjunction with this subject, suggesting that the political leanings of media institutions outweighed the proximity to natural disaster in this case.

III. Existing Scholarly Work

There is much scientific literature surrounding the “mediation of climate change” and the relationship between environment, experience, media, and conceptions of climate change. Scientists are generally in agreement about the urgency and relevance of climate change in our world today, yet the role of media in discussing and disseminating information about it is much more fluid. Scholars have been, and continue to be, therefore, extremely interested in the process that builds public understanding of, and stance on, the issue – many pointing to the news media as the chief communicators of the issues to the public. Media of course, are dialectical, in that they can both reflect perceptions and form them. In this way, academics have sought to both investigate the extent to which media affect the public’s forging of opinion, and additionally, the extent to which the public has used media to communicate these opinions and experiences.

In this endeavor, scholars have looked to the discourse surrounding climate change in other nations to further understand the model in the United States. Nerlich, Forsyth, and Clarke – particularly interested in the overlap between science, phycology and linguistics – set out to examine differences in the American and British media discourse on the topic of climate change. Analyzing language patterns found in articles published between 2000 and 2009 in The (London) Times and The New York Times on the topic of climate change, they found that the US “still constructs climate change as a problem,” whereas the UK is more solutions-oriented. This idea of “construction” demonstrates the authors’ opinion that the issue of climate change is one actively constructed, or built, by the media.[footnoteRef:4] This perspective positions the media as the main determinant in “constructing” readers’ views on environmental issues – pointing to differing linguistic patterns as the tools of construction. In this way, Nerlich, Forsyth, and Clarke show how differences in national dialogues can construct different climate worldviews for readers – which can be mapped onto the present investigation of environmental framing between local and national media, rather than between two nations. [4: Nerlich, Brigitte, et al. “Climate in the News: How Differences in Media Discourse Between the US and UK Reflect National Priorities.” Environmental Communication, vol. 6, issue 1, 2012, pp. 44-63.]

The next question is, then, what (or who) determines the way in which issues of environment and climate change are framed by the media? Shehata and Hopmann investigate this very question, in comparing the United States’ media structure to that of Sweden. They probe the “extent to which news coverage of climate change is influenced by domestic political elite discussion, or by the scientific consensus surrounding the issue.” Is it politics or science that guide these national conversations? After considering 1,785 articles published over a 10-year period along with news coverage of the Kyoto and Bali summits, the Swedish scholars actually found a striking similarity in the coverage of the two countries – concluding that national political elites have a weak influence on how climate change is framed in the media.[footnoteRef:5] This study emphasizes the lack of power shared by Swedish and American leaders alike on national discussions of climate change – suggesting that nationally, science might hold more sway. Shehata and Hopmann’s exploration is limited, however, to the national scale – leaving questions of local power dynamics largely untouched. [5: Shehata, Adam, et al. “Framing Climate Change.” Journalism Studies, vol. 13, issue 2, 2013, pp. 175-192.]

Kirilenko and Molodtsova add this untapped local element in their study of local experience and global understanding as reflected by the media. It is especially relevant to this investigation because it directly questions the interplay between lived experience and mediated understanding of environmental topics at work with the coverage of the Louisiana Floods. They foray into the distance between the sensory experience of one’s local environment and their larger conception of climate change, considering the roles that mass media – and especially social media – might play. In using people as “sensors” through posts on Twitter, Kirilenko and Molodtsova gauge the level of public attention to climate change and global warming, looking to discern whether people noticed temperature anomalies in their regions and what influence their mediated perceptions had on this interaction. Here, they consider only changes in local temperature, not extreme weather events like the treacherous Louisiana storm. In the end, they found no convincing evidence that the media acts as a significant mediator in the relationship between local weather and climate change discourse.[footnoteRef:6] If not media, then perhaps this very local and personal interaction with climate is the key factor in forming opinion and attention. [6: Kirilenko, Andrei P., et al. “People as sensors: Mass media and local temperature influence climate change discussion on Twitter.” Global Environmental Change, vol. 30, 2015, pp. 92-100.]

Each of these thorough and well-executed studies serves as a block in the foundation of the present study on the Louisiana Floods. These works have set out with the same questions that I have, and found several answers that guide the way in which this study proceeds. Media have the unique ability to frame a subject for its viewers, but when compared to a personal interaction with the subject, have shown to be to be less influential. The present study delves into this institutional framing of climate change-related catastrophes, aiming to refine the distinction between local and national media when it comes to issues of environmental consequence.

IV. The Flood

Courtesy New York Times

The weather patterns that converged to produce the torrential downpour and the flooding to follow in southern Louisiana in mid-August of 2016 were remarkable in several ways. In short, this storm and the flooding that followed were not only devastating to local inhabitants, but also largely unprecedented in the region. It was a treacherous combination of extreme tropical moisture and a slow-moving low-pressure system hovering over the Gulf Coast that produced the intense precipitation that fell over the area between August 12 and 14 and continued throughout the week.[footnoteRef:7] The precipitable water – the amount of moisture held in the air over a given location – was at record levels that week above Louisiana. Over the next 48-hours, parts of East Baton Rouge, Livingston, and St. Helena parishes in southeast Louisiana would be inundated with as much as two feet of rain, while other regions received nearly as much, displacing over 30,000 people.[footnoteRef:8] By the time the rain stopped falling on August 17, the storm had released an estimated 7.1 trillion gallons of water onto the state – three times as much rainfall as in Hurricane Katrina.[footnoteRef:9] Compounding the damage and destruction of the storm was the region’s shock. Located significantly further inland and at a higher elevation than the typically flood-prone New Orleans, Baton Rouge and the surrounding areas are not usually victim to flooding of this magnitude. As such, the majority of residents did not have flood insurance. Angela Fritz from the Washington Post reported that the Red Cross alone suspected to spend between $35 million and $40 million on flood relief. [footnoteRef:10] [7: Fritz, Angela. “Study: Climate change made the deadly Louisiana flood far more likely,” Washington Post. September 7, 2016.] [8: Schleifstein, Mark. “Louisiana Flood of 2016 resulted from '1,000-year' rain in 2 days,” Times Picayune. August 15, 2016.] [9: World Weather Attribution & NOAA. “Louisiana Downpours, August 2016,” Climate Central. September, 2016.] [10: Fritz. “Study: Climate change made the deadly Louisiana flood far more likely,” Washington Post. September 7, 2016.]

Given the extreme circumstances and consequence of the storm and its flooding, scientists were quick to consider the possibility of a connection between this event and climate change – especially because trends of increased precipitation and stormy weather have previously been linked to temperature rise. According to Fritz at the Washington Post, “The moisture component is where climate change comes in — warmer air can hold more water vapor. As the air warms due to greenhouse gas emissions, the air gets more humid, and there’s more moisture that generates more rain.” The association here between warmer air and higher moisture seems to be a natural assumption, but when it comes to weather patterns and climate change, many factors can play a role. The task of “attribution,” that is, analysis studying how climate change has influenced individual extreme weather events, is a much more complex, and precise, process.[footnoteRef:11] [11: Fritz. “Study: Climate change made the deadly Louisiana flood far more likely,” Washington Post. September 7, 2016.]

The scientists at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab and the World Weather Attribution joined forces in the days following the storm to set about a “rapid response study” to probe this question of attribution. They found, almost certainly, that human-caused climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of heavy rains, such as those in the August storm, in the Central U.S. Gulf Coast region. Specifically, they write,

“In our expert judgment and drawing upon results from multiple peer-reviewed methods, the increase in probability is at least 40% – but it may be much larger. The increase in probability corresponds to an increase in intensity of roughly 10%. By the end of the current century, if greenhouse gases continue to increase as projected, their impact will further increase the probability of an event like the one observed August 12th-14th.”[footnoteRef:12] [12: World Weather Attribution & NOAA. “Louisiana Downpours, August 2016,” Climate Central. September, 2016.]

In other words, in pre-industrial 1900, scientists might have expected an event of this magnitude to occur along the northern Gulf Coast from Houston to the panhandle of Florida once every 50 years. Today, in 2016, scientists should expect this type of event to occur, on average, once every 30 years. They should also expect such events to be 10% more intense than they would have been before the industrial revolution. As Fritz puts it so clearly, “in less than a century, climate change has cut our recovery time in half.”[footnoteRef:13] Residents of the hardest hit regions were forced to accept the brunt of this environmental realization in ways that have, and will continue to, change their daily lives. If they call it “climate change,” however, is a different matter. [13: Fritz. “Study: Climate change made the deadly Louisiana flood far more likely,” Washington Post. September 7, 2016.]

V. The Media Response

In the one-week period following this natural and human catastrophe, the progress and fall out of the storm made headlines in both local and national news – although national media was criticized for failing to dedicate enough attention to the unfolding story and its devastating fallout.[footnoteRef:14],[footnoteRef:15] Each was able to offer a fresh lens on the issue, one catering largely to the local, affected, communities, and one to the distant masses. With distinct orientations, each reflects a distinct type of interaction with the material at hand. Investigating, therefore, the way in which each responded to and covered the Louisiana Floods of 2016 should lend valuable insight into the difference, if any, that proximity to a natural disaster has on the treatment of this event. [14: Spayd, Liz. “On Gulf Coast flooding, The Times is late to the scene,” The New York Times. August 16, 2016. ] [15: Advocate staff. “New York Times public editor: We neglected our duty in Louisiana flood coverage,” The Advocate. August 16, 2016. ]

Key newspapers in the areas most affected by the storm and the flooding discussed the event widely and thoroughly over the weeks and months following the unnamed storm. Let’s consider first The Advocate, the leading newspaper in Baton Rouge and the largest in the state. After surveying the over 250 articles written and published by The Advocate from August 14-21, 2016, a shockingly meager number of stories emerged that discussed “climate change.” More precisely, only one out of the 254 stories published about the Louisiana Floods – rising by the minute in The Advocate’s Baton Rouge backyard – mentioned “climate change.”

This single Advocate-generated article, “Anatomy of the flood: Hurricane in ‘infancy’ was fueled by warm, moist Gulf air,” was published on August 18 and written by staff Advocate writer, Jeff Adelson. In the post, Adelson investigates the “rare weather phenomenon that could become increasingly common” that caused the Baton Rouge area storm and flooding. In keeping with other Advocate articles, he traces the deadly storm back to its origins – an unusual collision of extremely warm, moist air in the Gulf of Mexico with a slow-moving storm system. Unlike these other articles, however, Adelson widens his lens a bit further, hesitantly introducing a potential link to climate change:

“Experts caution that it may be too early to directly link the storms with climate change. But rising temperatures and a warmer Gulf of Mexico could mean more moisture in the air and more weather systems like the one that ravaged the state.”  

By way of “experts,” he quotes Alek Krautmann, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Slidell, David Easterling, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Centers for Environmental Information, and Barry Kleim, Louisiana’s climatologist. Krautmann and Easterling agree that incidents of extreme weather events and heavy storms have become increasingly common over the past 50 years due to changes in climate, but acknowledge the difficulty in connecting one particular event to climate change. Kleim is more hesitant; noting that the answer to the big question of “what’s going on?” with these “huge, catastrophic events” might be impossible to find. Adelson makes no firm conclusions, other than simply introducing climate change and the increased frequency of extreme weather events as possible connections.

His article is still attacked in the comments section for propagating the “global warming lie.” A nurse from a Baton Rouge hospital writes, “It's hard to find a courageous meteorologist that won't bow to the Global warming god… This is a freak random weather occurence [sic] and it has happened before. Unfortunate that this can't be predicted.”[footnoteRef:16] This sentiment of a “freak weather” event, beyond all explanation – especially the climate change one – is echoed throughout The Advocate’s articles and reader comments. Another article, “Historic rain, floods blast areas from East Baton Rouge and Tangipahoa parishes to Denham Springs,” quotes Baton Rouge local David Ryan as saying, “I’m not happy, but there’s nothing much you can do about it. It’s an act of God.” Climate change – or continued changes to our weather systems – is absent from the vocabulary of these Louisiana sources. While nearly all of the articles acknowledged the staggering disbelief and awe of its local citizens, most did not investigate the larger implications tied up in such an extreme weather event, positioning the storm as an isolated event. [16: Adelson, Jeff. “Anatomy of the flood: Hurricane in ‘infancy’ was fueled by warm, moist Gulf air,” The Advocate. August 18, 2016.]

In a telling counterpoint, two reader-written letters addressing climate change were published by the newspaper as well. The first, “After flood, focus on the environment,” [footnoteRef:17] was written by a teacher in North Bennington, Vermont and posted on The Advocate’s website on August 18. The second, “Ignoring climate change is a recipe for disasters,”[footnoteRef:18] was written by a student at the University of New Orleans and posted on August 19. Although evidence of a dissonance between media institution and reader-base, the letter from Vermont cannot rightfully be brought into a discussion of “local” media as it offers an outsider’s perspective. The student letter, therefore, might be considered as the only local reader expression. [17: Nowak, Robert. “Letters: After flood, focus on the environment,” The Advocate. August 18, 2016.] [18: Francois, Zachariah. “Letters: Ignoring climate change is a recipe for disasters,” The Advocate. August 19, 2016.]

In the New Orleans-based Times Picayune, similar results were found. The Picayune published 109 articles that covered the Louisiana Floods during this period. Again, only two articles mentioned climate change. Both of these Picayune stories mention climate change as an obligatory aside – a reference to statements made otherwise by other people or other publications. The first, “Gulf oil and gas lease sales become focus of protests,” published August 19, only indirectly mentions the Louisiana Floods – the center topic being environmentalist protests against Gulf oil and gas lease sales. “Climate change” is mentioned in a quote from a protestor (‘Climate change is a real thing and we're going to get hit first’), but otherwise absent from the discussion.[footnoteRef:19] The second article, “Green Party’s Jill Stein visits Baton Rouge amid presidential campaign,” published on August 21, briefly outlines Stein’s recent tour of flood damage across the state, noting a news release that addressed the politician’s standing on climate change: [19: Samuels, Diana. “Gulf oil and gas lease sales become focus of protests,” The Times Picayune. August 19, 2016.]

“The news release also said Stein would discuss her experiences later in the week at a press conference in Washington DC, highlighting the need for emergency action on climate change.”[footnoteRef:20] [20: Evans, Beau. “Green Party’s Jill Stein visits Baton Rouge amid presidential campaign,” The Times Picayune. August 21, 2016.]

Again, the rephrasing of another’s words, and then promptly swept aside. Notably, neither story is truly about the Louisiana Flood – both stumble upon the climatic event (and the topic of climate change) on the way to recounting another tale. These articles are barely worth examining in this investigation, as their attention to the Louisiana Floods in relation to climate change is negligible or non-existent. They do not answer the “why?” or “what’s going on here?” – in fact, they do not even ask it. However, as the sole Picayune articles that even approached both subjects within our weeklong period, they required analyzing.

The most relevant trend gleaned from the Picayune’s coverage of the unnamed storm was its tendency, much like The Advocate, to describe the event as a novelty exceeding all rational explanation. An article from August 18 quotes a local man as saying, "I'll stay here. It's my home. This was a once-in-a-lifetime, getting this water here."[footnoteRef:21] Increasingly, however, as shown by the NOAA report, events of this magnitude are expected to occur more frequently – once in every 30 years, or rather, a few times in a lifetime. [21: Rainey, Richard. “As Louisiana Flood of 2016 recedes, Livingston Parish takes stock,” The Times Picayune. August 18, 2016. ]

At the same time, key national publications also discussed the Louisiana Floods, although to a lesser degree. They tended to ask the “why” more aggressively and assertively, almost universally acknowledging climate change as a conceivable response. While coverage in both national publications was more sporadic, the content was often more pointed and profound than that in local outlets. The most striking and confident associations between the storm and patterns of climate change were published in these papers. Whether suggesting that the recent warming of our planet could have caused such an unexpected downpour, or simply mentioning “climate change” as a potential factor, these articles linked extreme climate events and our larger global temperature patterns together. Tasked with communicating national news to a national audience, they elevated the storm from “local incident” to yet another example of a much larger trend.

The Washington Post wrote and published 37 articles concerning the Louisiana Floods during the August 14-21 period – three of which related the extreme weather event to larger issues of climate change. The bulk of these articles focused on political issues, and how they were at play in the fall out of the Louisiana Flood. The first, “What we can say about the Louisiana floods and climate change,” was published on August 15 and widely circulated across other media channels – including The Times Picayune, which posted the story online on August 16. The article opens with this adage: “Here we are again, with a flood event upending the lives of large numbers of Americans and making everybody wonder about the role of climate change.”[footnoteRef:22] Mooney’s initial assumption, that “everybody” is wondering about the role of climate change in this, the most recent in a series of extreme and unexpected weather events, is a statement of national proportions. If the local media in Louisiana is any indication of “everybody,” evidently not. What seems to Mooney as a universal truth reveals another level of dissonance between the national media and their local counterparts – what one assumes to be universal, the other rejects completely. [22: Mooney, Chris. “What we can say about the Louisiana floods and climate change,” The Washington Post. August 15, 2016.]

On August 18, Mooney writes again on both topics – this time focusing on the human and social implications of more frequent and more severe storms projected to increase in conjunction with a warming planet. He loops the Louisiana floods into a larger dialogue that includes other extraordinary weather events from that week, including the San Bernardino forest fires and the permanent relocation of an Alaskan village threatened by rising sea levels. Mooney positions climate change as an ongoing phenomenon that should be central to all discussions of extreme weather trends. So much so, that he quotes Kevin Trenberth, a climate researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who calls reports that did not mention climate change “pathetic.”[footnoteRef:23] [23: Mooney, Chris. “‘A changing climate is and will continue to put people out of their homes,’” The Washington Post. August 18, 2016.]

Another article focused on the flood and climate change within the larger lens of the Presidential race, focusing on Donald Trump’s upcoming visit to the affected areas and its political potential. Titled “Donald Trump’s trip to Louisiana is the perfect opportunity to talk about climate change, which he won’t,” political writer Phillip Bump bemoans the contentious partisan meaning that “climate change” has been charged with. He writes,

“And yet, because it is such a politically divisive topic, climate change is barely mentioned in the presidential campaign, even as Donald Trump heads to the scene of the destruction.”[footnoteRef:24] [24: Bump, Phillip. “Donald Trump’s trip to Louisiana is the perfect opportunity to talk about climate change, which he won’t,” The Washington Post. August 19, 2016.]

Could this explain the decision of local newspapers to omit any mention of “climate change” in their discussions?

Moving to The New York Times, which published 12 articles about the Louisiana Floods in this weeklong period, mentioned climate change in three of them. The first, published August 16, paints a dire picture of the damage left in Louisiana as the floodwaters began to recede. In emphasizing the unusual storm’s place in “a recent and staggering pattern in more than half-dozen states” of extreme and unexpected flooding, authors Campbell Robertson and Alan Blinder warn readers that it should not be considered as a random or isolated event.[footnoteRef:25] Rather, they highlight the scope of its consequence – situating the disaster as more than a local issue, and as another local incident tied up in a problem of both national and global implications. [25: Robertson, Campbell & Alan Blinder. “As Louisiana Floodwaters Recede, the Scope of Disaster Comes Into View,” The New York Times. August 16, 2016.]

Another August 16 article leads with “climate change” in its opening sentence, in fact, as its opening word: “Climate change is never going to announce itself by name. But this is what we should expect it to look like.” Again, the author includes this event as just another point in a larger narrative, positioning it as the eighth event since May 2015 in which “the amount of rainfall in an area in a specified window of time matches or exceeds the NOAA predictions for an amount of precipitation that will occur once every five hundred years, or has a 0.2 percent chance of occurring in any given year,” and one of five American states that has experienced deadly flooding within the last 15 months.[footnoteRef:26] [26: Bromwhich, Jonah. “Flooding in the South looks a lot like climate change,” The New York Times. August 16, 2016.]

Overall, local media tended to see the storm and flooding as THE event; unprecedented, unexpected and inexplicable. National media, on the other hand, tended to see it as just another event, one more example of an ongoing trend.

VI. Institutional Bias?

The political leanings and tendencies of the state and regions producing the media content are important to note in this investigation, as the interests of the massive energy industry in Louisiana might inform state perceptions on climate change and its validity. According to “The Energy Sector: A Giant Economic Engine for the Louisiana Economy,” a study published in 2014 and discussed in depth by The Advocate, oil and gas producers, refiners and pipeline companies produce an incredible and growing stimulus for the state’s economy. One must only look one state to the east, says lead economist Loren Scott, to see “what Louisiana would look like without the energy sector”: at the time, Mississippi ranked 50th in per capita income, while Louisiana ranked 32nd.[footnoteRef:27] A more current Advocate editorial discusses the recent slow-down in Louisiana’s economy as a direct result of the collapse of the price of oil over the past two years, offering cautious optimism for the economy if federal regulations are dialed back under Trump. Clearly, the economic prosperity of the state is reliant on robust and unfettered oil and gas industries – which are in turn threatened by climate-conscious restrictions on emissions and greenhouse gasses. [27: Griggs, Ted. “Energy Industry Drives Louisiana’s Economy,” The Advocate. July 26, 2014. ]

This extends to Louisiana state leadership as well, with governor John Bel Edwards – a Democrat – positioning himself at odds with the policies of President Obama by remaining vocally unconvinced of human contribution to climate change. Edwards is not alone among Louisiana politicians – of both political leanings – in his reticent stance. Current Republican Senators David Vitter and Bill Cassidy, in addition to former Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, have all opposed government efforts to slow climate change through industry restrictions.[footnoteRef:28] Vitter and Cassidy, in fact, petitioned the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to reconsider a new rule that requires states to address climate change in disaster planning and preparedness as a condition for federal disaster mitigation grants.[footnoteRef:29] They are so opposed to even addressing climate change that they joined with five other GOP senators to compose a letter of complaint. Further, Louisiana’s state climatologist, Barry Kleim, is skeptical and hesitant about linking recent historic weather events to climate change. As the state authority for all things climate, Kleim has the power to set the tone of the state when it comes to issues within his purview. [28: O’Donoghue, Julia. “John Bel Edwards: Climate change may not be man-made.” The Advocate. September 21, 2016. ] [29: Alpert, Bruce. “Vitter and Cassidy want FEMA to drop linkage of mitigation grants to climate change action.” The Advocate. May 5, 2015. ]

VII. Conclusion

The national media, specifically The New York Times, was the subject of local complaint and frustration due to its lack of coverage on the storm and its devastation. Noticeably, the newspaper only published 12 of its own articles in the week following the storm, one of which was an admission that “the Times was late to the scene” on this story. This tension is as interesting as it is telling, illustrating the inherent distance between local and national media. To The Advocate, this unnamed storm of unprecedented proportions was all consuming, imminent and impossible to ignore – worthy of about 35 articles per day. To the national media, this was just another story – third or fourth in line after political and Olympic drama that dominated headlines and airwaves. This is convincing evidence that proximity to natural catastrophe does in fact make a difference in the nature and volume of media coverage – and that personal implication in a matter leads to a higher and more intense level of attention to it. However, proximity falls short when it comes to the highly politicized topic of climate change.

A striking imbalance between local and national publications’ mentions of climate change in relation to the Louisiana Flood validates this charge – not only in the measure of their mentions but also in the nature through which they presented the topic. National publications produced fewer stories on the storm and flood, but were much more likely to bring up climate change in their discussions. Local publications, however, producing hundreds of storm and flood focused articles in that first week, rarely if ever mentioned climate change in any capacity. Most interestingly, in local outlets, the topic of climate change was introduced earliest and most often by readers – in comments and in letters that responded to the myriad of articles that overlooked it.  Out of all storm-related coverage that week, 0.39% of stories in The Advocate mentioned climate change, 1.83% of stories in The Times Picayune did, 8.1% in The Washington Post, and 25% in The New York Times. Political bias on the local scale, with nearly all Louisiana power-holders in agreement against climate change policy, worked to influence the way in which “climate change” would be framed by these institutions: as a non-issue.

This all accumulates in the conclusion that, after the 2016 Louisiana storm and floods, the political leanings of media institutions outweighed the proximity to natural disaster in discussions of climate change on the local scale.

Bibliography

Adelson, Jeff. “Anatomy of the flood: Hurricane in ‘infancy’ was fueled by warm, moist Gulf air,” The Advocate. August 18, 2016. http://www.theadvocate.com/louisiana_flood_2016/article_484e5bbe-6570-11e6-a601-97bfee488f0d.html?sr_source=lift_amplify

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