It’s perhaps the most important question to ask when deciding what priority to give to a news story.

How many people does this affect?

For many years, I’ve used the comparison between a strike by dustmen and women, and industrial action by museum workers.

We’d notice one a lot more – and a lot sooner. And it would affect us all, no matter where we lived, how old we were or how much we earned.

There’s a story out there that affects us all, too. And not just everyone on this planet now. But billions more in generations as yet undreamed of.

And yet, it rarely troubles the front pages, the top half of news websites or the first few minutes of TV news bulletins.

Or it never used to. To be fair to the BBC, it devoted a fantastic chunk of the 10 O’Clock News to climate change on Monday night.

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report makes for grim reading, with the world heading for a disastrous 3C rise in temperatures because of man’s inability to turn what will be a literal tide on global warming.

I’m in no position to crow. I’ve just bought a diesel car which I drive nearly 90 miles a day to and from work. What follows is the height of hypocrisy.

But coverage that cuts through to the mainstream, which opens hearts and minds to the need for individual change and political pressure, is as rare as the sight of a Nissan Leaf on Jeremy Clarkson’s driveway.

There couldn’t be a more potentially dramatic story, affecting more people over a longer period of time.

And yet that report was crowded out by other, more short-lived, and arguably more trivial crises.

The Guardian led on the IPCC warnings, but its former editor Alan Rusbridger was scathing about how few other titles gave up front page space.

1 (thread). Most UK papers think a drunken snog at Strictly is the most important story today. More important than a terrifying new #IPCC report saying we have 12 years to stave off the catastrophic effects of global warming… pic.twitter.com/NuO8OKkrEB

— alan rusbridger (@arusbridger) October 8, 2018

 

Now I’m as big a fan of Strictly as the next slightly embarrassed man, and I’m fascinated to know whether it’s Last Tango in Elstree for Seann and Katya.

But journalism has to raise its game here.

As this well-argued piece in the Washington Post says, every other issue covered is a bump in the road to environmental change.

We’ve seen titles such as the Mail begin to effect change over plastic bags and microbes.

But this risks being the equivalent of spitting in the sand to ease a drought unless it gathers dramatic pace.

The priority which the BBC went out of its way to give to climate change earlier this week shows what can be done.

There is scope for grassroots campaigning, pledging and lobbying in every community in this land.

When our children and their children ask what we did to preserve their planetary home, I’d like to think journalists had an answer – and a clear conscience.