How should news sources decide who to give coverage to?

If you’re not reading Climate Progress already, you should be. Period. CP is pretty much the best source out their for the politics and policy of energy, climate, and their economic impacts.

Joe Romm’s post on the DC climate rally got me thinking about media coverage. More specifically, how should media organizations make decisions on what to spend their airtime/journalistic space covering? Clearly, decisions on this subject are complicated and the responsibility for making them doesn’t rest on a single person. It’s thus rather irresponsible to denounce a news organization as partisan or having an agenda based on a single editorial decision. Smart people can and do disagree on what deserves reporting.

But faced with the overwhelming lack of reporting on the threat from and policies intended to combat climate change, it’s hard to excuse any news outlet from ignoring or downplaying the the issue. As Romm puts it:

Yes, the biggest single climate rally in U.S. history is dismissed by comparison with the hypothetical cumulative turnout of dozens of future rallies on immigration. Who says the media isnt fair?

Now, the obvious response to this is that the size of a protest shouldn’t really determine how much coverage it gets. For example, I don’t dismiss Tea Party protest because they’re not big enough (in fact, I think they’re alarmingly large), I dismiss them because they have no idea what they’re talking about. I find it difficult to believe that any journalist takes the grievances of the Tea Party as seriously as the threat from climate change, but that sure is what it seems like based on the quantity (the New York Times doesn’t appear to have much coverage at all) of coverage.

Bottom line: if you think that socialism is a greater threat to this country than climate change, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.