Public distrusts climate science partly due to lack of media literacy, says researcher
Though most climate science studies show evidence that climate change is real, the public persists in distrusting the science.
That’s because of the doubt planted by climate change skeptics in the media and a lack of “media literacy education,” asserts Caren Cooper, a research associate who works on citizen science projects at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in a Forum article in the March issue of BioScience magazine.
Evidence shows that media literacy education would help the public critique media messages and better assess the truth behind them, Cooper says.
“To be climate change literate, the public must first be media literate,” since print, TV and radio reports and opinion pieces are the main ways that the public gets its information about climate change science, Cooper says.
Full story: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March11/ClimateMedia.html
