Gannet Newspapers and the Copenhagen Conference

Gannett is the company which publishes USA Today, the #2 newspaper in the United States, with a daily circulation of nearly 2 million readers. The only paper which is read by more people than USA Today is the Wall Street Journal (owned by Ruppert Murdoch's News Corp.). Gannett is, in fact, the number one news publisher in the nation, with 84 daily newspapers and 850 non-daily publications. Of the nation's 100 biggest papers, Gannett publishes 13.

It also broadcasts from 23 American TV stations, with a total of 20 million viewers. In addition, 27 million people (16% of American internet users) browse Gannett sites. Furthermore, Gannett has installed TV sets in office buildings (waiting rooms, elevators, lobbies) which broadcast news and entertainment to around 3 million viewers.* This means that someone reading USA Today, then surfing the internet, then watching TV, after coming home from an office building, may have seen the same "news" from 4 apparently different sources.

If media inform you four times a day "There are terrorists out there," you will begin to believe. If these media tell you that the president is doing a good job on climate change, you may rest assured that it is so. Many viewers and readers do not have time or interest enough to pursue the matter further, so their "reality" is defined by Gannett and similar mainstream news sources.

The company's British arm publishes 17 daily papers and 200 weekly papers, reaching 13 million people a week. In addition, its web presence "informs" 6 million web users. Most of its papers are distributed free, for the purpose of selling advertising mixed with feel-good local news. But it also publishes the Glasgow Herald and the Lancashire Telegraph.*

* (These data come from the company's website, accessed this month.)

Because USA Today is known for shallow reporting and a conservative outlook, I formed a hypothesis (use your dictionary - that's an important word) that all of its papers would react to the Copenhagen Conference with empty "feel-good" reporting that left readers unaware of the tragic failure of that summit meeting. Mostly, I was right.

USA Today had this headline on December 19th:
U.N. chief says 'we have a deal' on climate change
(While the first two paragraphs extolled the Conference, the third paragraph introduced some "balanced reporting".)
"Obama's successful 11th-hour bargaining Friday with China, India, Brazil and South Africa— the world's key developing nations — sets the stage for future cooperation between developed and developing nations. But the resulting "Copenhagen Accord" was protested by several nations that demanded deeper emissions cuts by the industrialized world and felt excluded from the major-nation bargaining process."

Some of the objections to the "deal" were mentioned, but the general approval of world leaders was noted and the supposed advantages of the treaty were enumerated. The fairly long article ended by noting that:

"The $100-billion-a-year climate aid goal set for 2020 falls below estimates made in some expert studies, including by the World Bank, which foresee a need for hundreds of billions of dollars each year to combat global warming as seas rise, species go extinct, farmlands go dry and storms become more severe."

In other words, the climate comes down to politicians talking and money moving around. The article, significantly, was not generated by Gannett, but by Associated Press (AP), which (along with UPI, Reuters and AFP) generate quite a bit of news content around the English-speaking world. While covering various objections to the Copenhagen Summit, this article left the reader assuming that everything will be all right, as long as we spend enough money. (This financialization of the environment allows rich investors to manipulate "carbon credits" and make fortunes, but may not be counted on to solve the climate crisis, in my humble opinion.)

Now, USA Today is a national newspaper, and uses AP news. What about the local papers Gannett runs? The Honolulu Advertiser's most up-to-date story was filed Dec. 17 (before an agreement was reached) and had little to report. The Indianapolis Star had not even covered the Summit, but ran this (Dec. 12) story:

The new socialism
"The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.

"One of the major goals of the Copenhagen climate summit is another NIEO shakedown: the transfer of hundreds of billions from the industrial West to the Third World..."

The Des Moines Register's latest story, when I checked on the 20th, was a Dec. 17 commentary that relations with China could be improved at the Climate Summit. It urged new respect for China. Des Moines, located in America's farming Midwest, is a large exporter of American food products. The previous day's article had noted that Tom Vilsack, Obama's Agriculture Secretary (former governor of Iowa) had given a speech in Copenhagen. The environmental issues of the Conference were not discussed in either article.

I checked several smaller Gannett papers across the US and they had generally ignored Copenhagen. Fine. I went to the British (Newsquest) papers that Gannett owns. Predictably, the smaller ones failed to mention any significant international news. But Lancashire is a large industrial town in Britain, source of quite a lot of carbon emissions. The Lancashire Telegraph had completely ignored the Summit, too.

So I was quite surprised to see not one but a series of scathing critiques in the Glasgow Herald. It's Dec. 19 article was titled:

Copenhagen: The deal explained
(After detailing the failures of the deal, the article noted that some politicians held out hope, but concluded:)

"But if this is, as leaders said, the first step, then it is the first step on what seems likely to be a long and difficult road."

The next day, one of the paper's editors printed an even more strongly worded editorial:

Copenhagen climate deal ‘a disaster for the planet’

Since this conforms to my own bias (yes, of course I have one), I was interested to find out how a Gannett paper had completely contradicted the overwhelming tendency to minimize objections to Copenhagen. I wrote to the paper, which was purchased by Gannett six years ago. When I get a reply, I will share it with the class.