Opportunities and obstacles for television weathercasters to report on climate change

摘要

"Global warming is the greatest scam in history." Those aren't the inflammatory words of a hy-perbolic politician on Capitol Hill, but rather a comment published on the Web by a local TV weath-ercaster in San Diego. With this Internet post in fall 2007, KUSI-TV's John Coleman once again pointed out the "schism between most researchers and some television weathercasters on the subject of global change" (Henson 2008). While Coleman refers to himself as "a mere TV weatherman" in his "Comments on GlobalWarming" blog (www.kusi.com/weather/ coleman,scorner/l 162i966.html), recent peer-reviewed research confirms that television weathercasters may be "the most prominent science communicators in our society" (Wilson 2008). Coleman's assertion was cited frequently by radio and cable TV political commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and also influenced other television weathercasters' reporting on the topic.