One climate report but 30 different headlines

Kudos to Jaime Fuller at the Washington Post for collecting these variations of the coverage of President Obama's climate assessment. The assessment itself is mostly unscientific fear-mongering, although I do like the section on mitigation efforts. Others have pointed out the anti-scientific nature of the assessment. But I like what Fuller did here because she shows how the media spins whatever the President says, mostly without any modicum of critical thinking or analysis.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/05/06/1-climate-report-and-30-different-headlines-written-on-it/

The report has been covered extensively by newspapers, magazines, blogs and television shows since its release. Many of the stories about the report -- as is always the case with politically charged issues and Obama administration documents -- were filled with opinionated inflections and internal debates about what the policy prescriptions and data would lead to down the road. The wide-ranging reactions to the report reveal a lot about the politics of the issue, but you don't need to read the articles to understand it all. A quick glance at the headlines reveals dozens of pointed fingers, disbelief, fear, skepticism and many, many, many ways to frame this single report. Many news consumers are only going to see one of these headlines, and are only going to understand one facet of this giant debate.

Try to match the headline with its source -- it's not as hard as you might think, and goes a long way toward explaining how much influence your media diet has on your politics -- and vice versa.  Click the link to find out where it's from.

There are the relatively straightforward headlines.

 

There are the terror-inducing headlines.

There are the terror-inducing clickbait headlines.

 

The Wall Street Journal headline unsurprisingly focuses on the potential financial fallout.

There are the "all politics is local" takes.

There are headlines that tackle one narrow section of the climate report.

There are the headlines for international audiences shaking their heads at us.

And there are the headline obviously written by people in D.C.

 

Most importantly for the future of the climate report and how it will be implemented, there are the headlines that manage to stuff a lot of politics into a few carefully chosen and bolded words -- something that can be said of many of the above headlines too. These headlines are perhaps the easiest to trace back to their source.