Campaigner, author, activist and columnist for The Guardian George Monbiot has been named as the number one journalist covering the environment in the UK following a Press Gazete survey.
He emerged as the clear winner after Press Gazette asked specialist journalists working in this field to name the people whose work they most highly rate.
In an interview which appears in the March edition of Press Gazette magazine he revealed that he reads around 600 pages of material in order to research each one of his weekly Guardian comment pieces.
Asked whether he has any gripes about environmental coverage in other publications, particularly around the subject of climate change, Monbiot told Press Gazette that some ‘are making a laughing stock of themselves by continuing to host people who know nothing whatsoever about the science of climate change but feel able to dismiss the entire cannon of climate science without ever having read a single peer-reviewed paper”.
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He added: ‘How these newspapers continue to damage their reputation by giving space to such people I just don’t understand it. Perhaps there’s a strong thread of scientific illiteracy running through those publications.”
He cited the Sunday Telegraph, ‘to a lesser extent’the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. He said: “All of them regularly host utterly daft comment pieces by people who are scientifically illiterate but claim that they know more about climate science than climate scientists.”
The whole environment journalists top-50 is only available in the paid-for print, and digital, editions of Press Gazette.
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But here is the top ten:
1) George Monbiot – The Guardian
2) Charles Clover – The Sunday Times
3) John Vidal – The Guardian
4) Fiona Harvey – The Guardian
5) Fred Pearce – Freelance
6) Michael McCarthy – The Independent
7) Richard Black – BBC Online
8) James Murray – BusinessGreen
9) Juliette Jowit – The Observer
10) Leo Hickman – The Guardian
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