Joe Romm -- a climate expert, physicist, energy consultant, and former Department of Energy official -- has a great new book out titled Straight Up: America's Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions.

In the very first chapter, Romm -- who also edits Center for American Progress' Climate Progress blog -- takes on media coverage of climate change and doesn't disappoint. The following excerpt is presented with permission:

Chapter 1: The Status QuoMedia

MEDIA COVERAGE OF GLOBAL WARMING HAS not been very good nor is it likely to improve. Historically, even the most respected newspapers have fallen into the trap of giving the same credence-and often the same amount of space-to a handful of U.S. scientists, most receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry, as they give to hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists. No surprise that much of the public has ended up with a misimpression about the remarkable strength of our scientific understanding and the need for action (see chapter 8).

The study “Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S. Prestige Press” analyzed more than 600 news articles published from 1990 to 2002 in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal. The study found “significant difference between the scientific community discourse and the U.S. prestige press discourse.” For instance,“53 percent of the articles gave roughly equal attention to the views that humans contribute to global warming and that climate change results exclusively from natural fluctuations.”

In my blogging since mid-2006, I've found that the media coverage has not improved much. Why? One reason is that as the climate story has become a first-tier political story, more and more pieces are being written by senior political reporters, who know very little about global warming and who haven't bothered to educate themselves on what is indisputably the story of the century. Instead, they employ the horse-race perspective that dominates today's political coverage, attempting only to measure who is up and who is down. The publication on the web of the e-mails stolen from UK researchers in late 2009 allowed many media outlets to continue to miscover the science and give undue credence to those spreading anti-science disinformation.

Media critiques are among the most popular Climate Progress.org pieces. As the selection of posts in this chapter shows, media coverage across the board-from the science to the economics to the solutions-is still doing a grave disservice to the public.

I highly recommend you pick up a copy of Romm's Straight Up today at Amazon.com.