Recent Issues

Global Economy
Can Globalization 'Go Social'?

• In a world continuing to harden socially because of rapid and unsettling modernizations, could prevailing thinking about globalization shift toward the social?

Civil Society
Big Democracies at the Crossroads

• In a balloting year filled with surprises from India and Venezuela, and with Americans battered by the Bush-Kerry race, what do Russia and Indonesia tell us about the future character of democracy as a globally expanding project?

This October at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, an American physicist reported a surprising jump in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide. While the startling new data from Hawaii could indicate that global warming is increasing even faster than before, it was two London newspapers—The Guardian and The Independent—who broke the story to the world. The major American press or broadcast channels never mentioned it. Climate change is easily the most serious global issue of the 21st century, yet why are the US major media failing to educate Americans, blindfolding their audiences as they turn a blind eye to the world?

The US press today is in “stage-two” denial of the climate crisis. Editors acknowledge its existence even as they minimize its scope and urgency. This is evident from the pattern of coverage that provides occasional feature stories about the decimation of the forests in Alaska—but which continues to ignore the central diplomatic, political and economic conflicts around the issue of global warming. Illustration by Christopher Bing

Commentary Where there's smoke, there's media, but little more Americans miss the picture on global warming. By Ross Gelbspan Sidebar The heat is on, but the US press is off Data Human contribution to warming documented US prestige-press coverage of existence of anthropogenic contribution to global warming 1988-2000. By Maxwell T. Boykoff and Jules M. Boykoff Book Boiling Point: Courting public opinion amid crisis Op-Ed Underplaying the story of the century From casus belli to climate change, ideology prevails over US major media. By Peter Orne Commentary Americans were alerted about greenhouse-gas emissions in the 1970s The Mertz-Gilmore Foundation's effort to bring science to society. By Harland Cleveland Figure War and weather: An Unlikely Cause and Effect