Edit: check for yourself if you like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf
the boy who cried wolf was about someone stirring hysteria so much it desensitized people beyond the point of caring when the threat was actually existential. it's not a perfect analogy but basically we've been crying wolf for decades (focusing on the wrong things: denuclearization, air quality, ozone layer, full-electric cars; vs. energy density, dense land uses, hybrids, democratic economies, etc.) and now that the wolf is starting to eat us, crying more won't help
The boy who cried wolf is about telling fibs ruining one's credibility, it's entirely different.
Our news sources shouldn't suppress reporting slow-moving disasters just because humans have a short attention span.
I think if you asked the average person about that they would not think they are very credible.
I don't know what specific claims you're referring to. I was a child in the 1980s and you should provide citations when making such historical claims. For all I know these purported scientific predictions were qualified with murky probabilities. Publications having error bars +- 50 years, and we're just playing some kind of 40+ year game of telephone hearsay.
But you are speaking as if sea levels went down since the 1980s which is obviously not the case.
One could see how that could be seen as crying wolf.
Being alarmist helps no one.
Just be factual about it, it's not the news media's job to rile people up or get them to take some kind of action.
according to Webster news is just: 1a: a report of recent events