A stormy forecast for climate change reporting › Opinion (ABC Environment)

Where did all the climate change stories go? "The [programmers] are against it because it loses ratings," says a senior BBC journalist. "The wave [of public interest] has gone. There is climate change fatigue. That is why I am not [reporting] it now."

Other journalists agree. Even reporters at The Guardian, which especially targets environmental reporting, complain that it's difficult to get a run. Another UK broadcast journalist said he was warned that putting climate change on prime time would risk losing a million viewers.
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The biggest hurdle mentioned by most journalists was the so-called 'Climategate', the controversy surrounding the publication of hundreds of hacked emails from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK between influential climate scientists. It was a "defining moment in all our careers," according to an environment editor.
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Many journalists say the UEA email hacking, combined with the discovery of an error regarding the melting of the Himalayan glaciers in the 2007 report by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), also proved they had failed to cast a critical enough eye on climate science and that they had been far too dismissive of sceptics.

Probably the most important reaction to the UEA hacking for journalists was in their own newsrooms, among their own editors who are the gatekeepers controlling if your work appears and how prominently. While some UK surveys show no dramatic loss of credibility for climate scientists with the public, here's how some senior journalists described what it was like in their newsrooms after hacking:

"dirty looks"
"sense of betrayal"
thought we'd "gone native"
"you told me the science was settled - and it isn't!"

"Climate-gate was extremely damaging in many ways. It gave the impression that journalists had been duped. I think in the end it was mountains out of mole-hills but it looked really bad," said a print journalist.
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Some say they wished they had engaged credible sceptics earlier.
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The forecast is grim. Around 4,000 reporters went to Copenhagen, Denmark; only 150 attended follow-up negotiations in Bonn, Germany, and some senior correspondents say they might not go to Cancun, Mexico, in December for the next UN climate change summit. Some believe climate change as a story is finished. New York Times blogger, Andy Revkin, says it is now turning into an energy and business story.