Continues here on aljazeera after listening post station thats a lot of level. Twenty seventeen has been full of stories that have changed the Global Political landscape and aljazeera has been there to cover them all to. Join us as we look back at some of our most memorable interviews of the year this special edition of talk tells it at this time. I took a hard look at that i could. Feel like. Doing. My job. Thank you robert perry like oil. Alarm richard gives britain europe the listening post this week were breaking format to talk about a gaping hole in News Coverage on a story that matters according to a Global Survey taken earlier this year the number one threat in peoples minds was the Islamic State number two was Climate Change but when Climate Change makes it onto the news agenda as it has this week with the cop twenty three conference in germany or alongside coverage of extreme weather events it seldom stays there once the storms or the conferences pass the media move on were focusing on the Climate Change story this week in the coverage it does not get in part two of our program we travel to indonesia where reporting on environmental stories is often stymied by corporate forces with an eye on the bottom line but first the listening posts will yawn on how journalists and the news outlets they work for consistently fall short on what may be the biggest story of them all the future viability of the planet. November two thousand and fifteen the twenty first United NationsClimate Change conference all twenty one in paris World Leaders gathering to address the global existing threat to the climate. Even some coverage was initially overshadowed by security terror after multiple shooting and bomb attacks in the same city just days before. The agreement though begun nonbinding did at least win back the headlines. About. Leaders promise to reduce their carbon output as soon as possible and to do their best to keep going to warming below two degrees celsius. This is burst of news coming out from paris that the world had come together and that there was agreement on tackling Climate Change there was this narrative that paris was the last best chance to save the planet so there was incredible pressure to sell the result as a victory and then the media followed suit and engaged in a lot of depictions of kind of corporate and Government Back slapping. The international collective on environment culture politics trucks Climate Change coverage in media around the globe media interest spiked when barack obama attended the copenhagen climate talks in two thousand but then Climate Change all but disappeared from view until paris the United States will withdraw. From the paris. Climate accord. Earlier this year headline grabber in chief donald trump put Climate Change back in the news when he decided to pull the us out of the Paris Agreement. Media matters for america watches us Mainstream Media for their climate coverage the most telling finding is that aside from when World Leaders are raising or dashing hopes most of the time this simply nothing to see. In june of this year there was a big burst of coverage when trump announced he was going to pull the us out of the paris climate agreement and in the year and a half in between there was almost no coverage whatsoever in the us media. During the president ial Election Campaign there was not a single segment about how the election would affect Climate Change that was a huge missed by the media dont trump said more than once that he intended to pull the us out of Paris Agreement but the media did not cover that the story of the wall from cork twenty one the hope and then there was this sudden evaporation of that whole first of all its a tragedy because Climate Change is a real problem and it is causing enormous uncertainty and instability around the world in a fit. It created this bus suddenly everyone was talking with what is Climate Change what is happening why is it important that the u. S. Stays in this agreement or why is it so bad that the u. S. Is pulling out. About the trump effect only underlines the medias tendency to seek villains and heroes to focus our attention to look for someone or some country to blame for a while that was china because china signed on for paris accords and also has made a massive investment in Renewable Energy that no longer washes in contrast to trump the media at present Justin Trudeau the Prime Minister of canada as a kind of environmental adonis. But in fact trudeau has approved a whole suite of fossil fuel projects tar sands pipelines arctic fracking liquefied natural gas plants all of which absolutely obliterate canadas paris targets environmental journalism was more about the drama of the players involved and less about the actual discussion of the planet and with donald trump withdrawing the United States support i think theres more and more opportunity to start raising questions about who are the human lives on the ground who are the people that are being affected. Climate change impacts all rule around us once in a century weather events are happening every year and scientists agree that if much more is not done soon the worst by far is yet to come. Journalists the question of how bleak to paint the future and how audiences might respond. If you look at stories that come out about Climate Change its all about doom and gloom Sea Level Rise wont stop at six feet theyre likely to rise at an even faster rate its all about discuss just how does it change you and the birds legs and she in turn for the worse so there is fear and people really dont know what they can do when you talk to environmental journalists theres that conversation thats happening in terms of. Striking a balance between being overdramatic or is that drama necessary today there was. A recent cover story in new York Magazine about the worst case outcomes of Climate Change a lot of climate activists and advocates were unhappy because they felt like he was presenting such a grim scenario but the fact is that the story did really well it attracted a lot of attention a lot more than most climate coverage does on the one hand theres a real need for. A real desire among journalists in the press in general to tell the story in all of its seriousness on the other hand theres a real desire not to make people too scared when we know rate future is a gap in the reporting between what the future looks like and what we can do in the present so the tricky part about climate journalism is that often the Climate Change impact happens in a slow motion we will be underwater if nothing is done on the other hand sometimes Climate Change plays out and shocks that monster hurricane the strongest ever on record of you so its precisely in those moments of climate shocks that we need the media to be honest and clear about how Climate Change is a factor but its often at those moments that they motion away from talking about it and. For some while the media politicized those yet another tragedy dont politicize a tragedy a cool often heard in the wake of destructive weather events the inherently unjust way in which climate impacts felt and caused. Over the post thirty years more than seventy percent of Greenhouse Gases were produced by just one hundred Major Companies and while Corporate Media often turn the spotlight on consumers and National Governments big business and the capitalist model itself a seldom examined. If you look at the media early voting you will see emissions coming out in the form of countries this is how much india is doing it these are my chinese doing but the amount of carbon china pumps into the atmosphere maybe over estimation is the natural reaction is oh the governments of this ones not. And companies and industries so in an era when neo liberalism has i think shut down really effective political choices. The media often downplays the solutions that are possible like theres a real disconnect between what people know should happen and what the media tells them is possible they rarely address solutions that are actually commensurate with the scale of the crises we face namely large scale economic and political changes realism is the problem here its unrealistic to expect politicians to basically say well thats the end of capitalism were going to do it with all the money making the profiteering the environmental destruction that its all built upon. You know if its unrealistic why would you report about it the really the only hope is just an incredible explosion Innovation One of the things we see in press reports on Climate Change is the idea that theres some sort of Magical Technology that can fix things for us maybe the market or its kind of a faith in something beyond she manatee to solve the problem that weve created the barriers to combat in Climate Change are not technological they are political and sometimes this fixation that scientists are going to come up with some new technology thats going to be a magic bullet distracts us from that action that we need to be taking right now. To some action is not an option its a clear and present necessity indigenous and tribal peoples all over the world have long resisted the Extractive Industries that the wrote the book their lands and rights. Environmentalists recognize indigenous struggle as a crucial front line in the fight against Climate Change but the media seldom see them as more than a side note. Late last year the Mainstream Media did finally descend almost to come to report on the Standing Rock sioux tribes resistance to the Dakota Access point line to. Journalists only showed up in big numbers when the law to protect is subject to deployments that provided the kind of lawyer telegenic flashpoint that most Climate Change stories. It didnt become a major story for legacy media until it no longer can be ignored the night of november twentieth when police used Water Cannons water protectors and set freezing temperatures at that point mediate no longer had any more excuses for why they couldnt. Send crews out to them what had become a very alarming set of circumstances dave are chimbo is a tribal leader for the Standing Rock sioux tribe that really instigated this. Resistance movement and he has spoken very eloquently about concern about Climate Change and how that intersects with the tribes concerned about their Water Quality and tribal sovereignty lessen our dependency on our character industry like fossil fuels but those arguments very rarely made it into media discussions of the Dakota Access pipeline within our settler colonial culture that there are these deeply how racist myths about Indigenous Peoples as dysfunctional as off cycles to progress you know simply shoved aside by history and i think that was why in south dakota it took so long for the Mainstream Media to finally turn their attention to what was really a historic stand off with big oil in america Standing Rock is not a stand alone case this is happened over and over again in Tribal Community here in the United States and around the world so is it going to take bottom up voices all the time to tell these Environmental Justice issues or is it now the onus on journalists to talk about Climate Justice and. Covering Climate Change means communicating urgency without. Looking beyond belief politics to a grassroots movements are already taking action. Identifying the actors and the system but got is here in the first place but to represent Climate Justice requires one more crucial step to identify and give voice to the victims who are feeling climate impacts not in the future but here and now treating Climate Change as a question of Environmental Justice means starting from its impact on people rather than from an abstract modeling or doomsday scenario as the best of environmental journalism takes what often private experiences of deprivation of injustice and enable people to can sort of connect the dots to create a shared experience around which they can organize themselves environment impacts politics social fabric economic everything. Communities that are finding it hard to feed their families people moving out of their new gauges and going into towns its important to report on these one of these because then you see how much of an impact i mean having before the impact becomes huge. So its journalists have to bring all these facets together and report is complex but you know be there everybody understands. One country with a huge stake in the Climate Change story is indonesia at the rate the temperatures and sea levels are rising two thousand of the countrys islands forty two million households are at risk of being swamped by the year two thousand and fifty but when you examine Mainstream Media coverage of Environmental Issues beyond the occasional disaster story on a forest fire or a mudslide theres not much on the bigger contextual picture media groups are a bit too close to reliant on agribusiness and Mining Companies who are among the worst environmental offenders mainstream journalists also find it hard to report on these issues because of political corruption so n. G. O. S have stepped in to fill the information gap the listening posts i mean actually ravi now on how the indonesian media tend to toe the corporate and government lie. In two thousand fifty five has swept through indonesias rain forests every second i dont like telling about the fact that the fact that i had. My last column landed two point six million hectares of funds an area roughly the size of rwanda was such a feat to clear space for palmer and plantations. The fires produced in just three weeks more Greenhouse Gases than germany does in an entire year. And that. The fires led indonesia news bulletins as long as they were being but the minute they died down so did the coverage. Forest fires have become an annual occurrence in indonesia and still the countrys media seldom devote the column inches and airtime needed to explore the causes behind that libby move money for. It is easier for journalists to cover sports or the economy because they have scores and numbers those stories are much easier to write than environmental stories where journalists have to understand biology ecology waste and chemistry. Going to miss behind. In your analysis of the medias comprehension of Environmental Issues is not good enough so they focus on the most obvious thing as like forest fires or damage caused by mining. The media dont go near subjects like water poisoned due to toxic waste of air pollution because they dont know enough about the subject no more no more. Crucial to how indonesias news outlets covered the environment and the destruction of it is the shape of the media landscape when the three decades of president mohamed so hot those dictatorship ended in one thousand nine hundred eight the indonesian media market went through a growth spurt nearly twenty years on one thousand five hundred t. V. Channels and five hundred radio stations compete for ratings and advertising revenue most of these outlets are owned by conglomerates many of which have big stakes in agribusiness and Mining Companies the countrys first and second largest media groups m. And c. And java as well as smaller groups like b. C. And citi corp all have significant interests in natural resources. Media media owners are often connected to owners of extractive Industry Companies like mining or palm oil which are among the greatest contributors to deforestation environmental damage and pollution a lot of media owners the stakeholders in these industries for instance theyre the bosses of t. V. Stations and coal Mining Companies at the same time. Period. Majeure environmental news doesnt sell journalists second guess themselves as to whether they should pursue such stories or not for example i was part of a program to help newspapers set up environmental editorial desks the tribune pic and barron newspaper agreed to set up a section called green city however it didnt bring in advertising or turn a profit so they shut it down. If you are in the us a c. V. One focuses on news events because we can see that this is what the viewers want and we take that into consideration but its breaking news special news have higher ratings. Than any hes thirty seven. So. We feel that its difficult to report on subjects that are not visible or the picture is not clear. However even when the picture is Crystal Clear the journalism can still fall short he simple in two thousand and six and a month volcano in sea the Water District of east java that exploded and submerged fifteen villages displacing almost forty thousand people the evidence overwhelmingly pointed a drilling taking place nearby and the mining by the oil and gas company up in the us as the most likely cause the company said a nearby earthquake had triggered the mud volcano and that in any case it had followed Industry Safety regulations at its job site. The owner. Was a government minister at the time he also owns three Media Outlets the suit up by a post viva news and t. V. One. For those following the Media Coverage of the disaster the reporting on these outlets was clearly compromise. And he caught a bank. By. Framing. The why. The media frames Environmental Issues is not neutral it depends on the political affiliations of the onus there were two different narratives on the panda news story the media owned by the bakri family in one called it the pseudo of july flight to imply that it was a Natural Disaster all the other media for example metra called it the law pinda much like using the name of the company responsible. In the mumbling a toss up when you arent allowed to go or go Bakley Daniel embark on a number one and so do not want to but i plan on when i lie and when there are a number of disasters abroad like sure no boat where the name of the town is used as a reference and if im not mistaken she do our job disaster was the phrase used by the government and parliament to refer to the incident so it seems the most appropriate terminology to us but we do not get orders from our own or saying this news should be like this or this news should be like that right now but i believe that ed let me know in relation to the lapindo story t. V. One report amply on how much sleep in there is paid out in compensation and made about everybody must buy get that up the middle on what up i believe the leo you cant is unlikely to. Have me going to see this evening but the channel wont do stories about how many dozens of houses face imminent flooding because of an overflowing down in the in. The complex web of corporate ownership and vested political interests in the media makes it difficult to report let alone investigate the impact poor industrial standards and monitoring has on the environment add to that a dearth of eliza sources minimal data and widespread corruption its nearly impossible to trace responsibility for the environmental damage engineers have stepped into the vacuum. And are helping reporters connect the dots in may this year the Mining Advocacy Network jackhammer teamed up with temple a weekly investigative publication to produce the killing pits a deeply reported story of corporate greed and irresponsibility in the mining industry. Investing. Our investigation found that those pits have claimed lives that children fell into the holes theyre poisonous due to Chemical Waste we reported this to the government the government applied sanctions to the company at the time and so the company sent thoughts to attack our headquarters we face a lot of intimidation threats and violence the culture of violence has never gone away and the authorities are also complacent a lot about him doesnt it back. In september two thousand and fifteen indonesias president. Announced that the country would cut the Group Therapy and house gas emissions by twenty nine percent by two thousand and thirty because the announcement was covered across indonesias news outlets but since then theres been little follow up on what progress that has been or whether there is a plan a toll to achieve this target what little media debate and coverage there is of efforts to protect indonesias rain forests are often framed in terms of a stark choice between the economy and the environment just plop us how it would be depending but People Economy are. You wanting to see the club. But ill get up in the event of that a commodity get some media argue that indonesia is a developing country and that it still needs more lands for Palm Oil Plantation as in twenty sixteen when the president wanted to extend the moratorium on palmer plantations to protect the people and some outlets planted the idea that business would grind to a halt osteens this is about assassinating out on me at the company i have learnt that i knew in the media care and do good reporting on the environment can there be any influence on policy or to protect it so unless there are more journalists writing about green issues Climate Change will not be stopped by. Youve been watching a special edition of our program on Climate Change and the global shortfall of coverage of that story were back to our usual format next week well see you then hear the listener. Michael. January. African heads of states and governments will gather. For this thirtieth assembly of the African Union where the goals set out see in twenty seventeen minutes rewind returns with brand new episodes updating some of the best aljazeera documentaries from over the years the biggest names in politics in business will meet in the swiss alps for the World Economic forum what will be talk of the agenda matthew engages in rigorous debate cutting through the headlines on the front and in a week our special coverage will be gauging reaction from around the world to americas most controversial president of modern times january. You are making very pointed remarks where on line the main u. S. Response to drug use and the drug trade over the last fifty years has been decriminalized or if you join us on said no you will first just wakes up in the morning and says i want to color the world in darkness and this is a dialogue and that could be whats leading to some of the confusion online about people saying they dont actually know whats going on join the conversation at this time on aljazeera. Aljazeera where ever you. Aljazeera is there want us to our brains but its also the to see what happens next iteration of them on the wired by the barriers for our mobile variegated seventy three that leap to hear the movies now is we were about change people have gone to hospital here the area the mission of the National Army is to search the entire one complex and aljazeera stories about telling it from the peoples press. What they think is happening in their. Nuclear bulletin is put on the desk in my office at all times kim jong uns sends a threat to the United States and an olive branch to south korea