Media coverage of climate change
Media coverage of climate change has had effects on public opinion on climate change, as it conveys the scientific consensus on climate change that the global temperature has increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases.
Climate change communication research shows that coverage has grown and become more accurate.
Some researchers and journalists believe that media coverage of politics of climate change is adequate and fair, while a few feel that it is biased.
History
The theory that increases in greenhouse gases would lead to an increase in temperature was first proposed by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1896, but climate change did not arise as a political issue until the 1990s. It took many years for this particular issue to attract any type of popular attention. In the United States, the mass media devoted little coverage to global warming until the drought of 1988, and James E. Hansen's testimony to the Senate, which explicitly attributed "the abnormally hot weather plaguing our nation" to global warming. Global warming in the U.S. gained more attention after the release of the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, featuring Al Gore.The British press also changed its coverage at the end of 1988, following a speech by Margaret Thatcher to the Royal Society advocating action against human-induced climate change. According to Anabela Carvalho, an academic analyst, Thatcher's "appropriation" of the risks of climate change to promote nuclear power, in the context of the dismantling of the coal industry following the 1984–1985 miners' strike was one reason for the change in public discourse. At the same time environmental organizations and the political opposition were demanding "solutions that contrasted with the government's".
In 2007, the BBC announced the cancellation of a planned television special Planet Relief, which would have highlighted the global warming issue and included a mass electrical switch-off. The editor of BBC's Newsnight current affairs show said: "It is absolutely not the BBC's job to save the planet. I think there are a lot of people who think that, but it must be stopped." Author Mark Lynas said "The only reason why this became an issue is that there is a small but vociferous group of extreme right-wing climate 'sceptics' lobbying against taking action, so the BBC is behaving like a coward and refusing to take a more consistent stance."
A peak in media coverage occurred in early 2007, driven by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. A subsequent peak in late 2009, which was 50% higher, may have been driven by a combination of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit email controversy and December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
The Media and Climate Change Observatory team at the University of Colorado Boulder found that 2017 "saw media attention to climate change and global warming ebb and flow" with June seeing the maximum global media coverage on both subjects. This rise is "largely attributed to news surrounding United States President Donald J. Trump's withdrawal from the 2015 United Nations Paris Climate Agreement, with continuing media attention paid to the emergent US isolation following through the G7 summit a few weeks later."
Media coverage of climate change during the Trump Administration remained prominent as most news outlets placed heavy emphasis on Trump-related stories rather than climate-related events. This shift in media focus is referred to as "Trump Dump" and was shown to peak in times when the President was most active on Twitter. Just in the year 2017, the word "Trump" was mentioned 19,187 times in stories covered by five of the nation's biggest press accounts, with "climate" being the second most frequent word.
In a 2020 article, Mark Kaufman of Mashable noted that the English Wikipedia's article on climate change has "hundreds of credible citations" which "counters the stereotype that publicly-policed, collaboratively-edited Wikipedia pages are inherently unreliable".
Common distortions
Factual
Scientists and media scholars who express frustrations with inadequate science reporting argue that it can lead to at least three basic distortions. First, journalists distort reality by making scientific errors. Second, they distort by concentrating on human-interest stories rather than scientific content. And third, journalists distort by rigid adherence to the construct of balanced coverage. Bord, O'Connor, & Fisher argue that responsible citizenry necessitates a concrete knowledge of causes and that until, for example, the public understands what causes climate change it cannot be expected to take voluntary action to mitigate its effects.In 2022 the IPCC reported that "Accurate transference of the climate science has been undermined significantly by climate change countermovements, in both legacy and new/social media environments through misinformation."
A study published in PLOS One in 2024 found that even a single repetition of a claim was sufficient to increase the perceived truth of both climate science-aligned claims and climate change skeptic/denial claims—"highlighting the insidious effect of repetition". This effect was found even among climate science endorsers.
Narrative
According to Shoemaker and Reese, controversy is one of the main variables affecting story choice among news editors, along with human interest, prominence, timeliness, celebrity, and proximity. Coverage of climate change has been accused of falling victim to the journalistic norm of "personalization". W.L Bennet defines this trait as: "the tendency to downplay the big social, economic, or political picture in favor of human trials, tragedies and triumphs". The culture of political journalism has long used the notion of balanced coverage in covering the controversy. In this construct, it is permissible to air a highly partisan opinion, provided this view is accompanied by a competing opinion. But recently scientists and scholars have challenged the legitimacy of this journalistic core value with regard to matters of great importance on which the overwhelming majority of the scientific community has reached a well-substantiated consensus view.In a survey of 636 articles from four top United States newspapers between 1988 and 2002, two scholars found that most articles gave as much time to the small group of climate change deniers as to the scientific consensus view. Given real consensus among climatologists over global warming, many scientists find the media's desire to portray the topic as a scientific controversy to be a gross distortion. As Stephen Schneider put it:
Science journalism concerns itself with gathering and evaluating various types of relevant evidence and rigorously checking sources and facts. Boyce Rensberger, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Knight Center for Science Journalism, said, "balanced coverage of science does not mean giving equal weight to both sides of an argument. It means apportioning weight according to the balance of evidence."
The claims of scientists also get distorted by the media by a tendency to seek out extreme views, which can result in portrayal of risks well beyond the claims actually being made by scientists. Journalists tend to overemphasize the most extreme outcomes from a range of possibilities reported in scientific articles. A study that tracked press reports about a climate change article in the journal Nature found that "results and conclusions of the study were widely misrepresented, especially in the news media, to make the consequences seem more catastrophic and the timescale shorter".
A 2020 study in PNAS found that newspapers tended to give greater coverage of press releases that opposed action on climate change than those that supported action. The study attributes it to false balance.
Research that was done by Todd Newman, Erik Nisbet, and Matthew Nisbet shows that people's partisan preference is an indicator as to which media outlet they will most likely consume. Most media outlets often align with a particular partisan ideology. This causes people to resort to selective exposure which influences views on world issues such as climate change beliefs.
Since 1990 climate scientists have communicated urgent warnings while simultaneously experiencing the media converting their statements into sensational entertainment.
Alarmism
To achieve climate action
is using inflated language, including an urgent tone and imagery of doom. In a report produced for the Institute for Public Policy Research Gill Ereaut and Nat Segnit suggested that alarmist language is frequently used in relation to environmental matters by newspapers, popular magazines and in campaign literature put out by the government and environment groups. It is claimed that when applied to climate change, alarmist language can create a greater sense of urgency.It has been argued that using sensational and alarming techniques often evokes "denial, paralysis, or apathy" rather than motivating individuals to action and does not motivate people to become engaged with the issue of climate change. In the context of climate refugees—the potential for climate change to displace people—it has been reported that "alarmist hyperbole" is frequently employed by private military contractors and think tanks. Some associate these displacement predictions with white genocide conspiracy theory due to the unpopular demographic outcomes associated with so-called "climate refugees".
To challenge the science related to global warming
The term alarmist has been used as a pejorative by critics of mainstream climate science to describe those that endorse the scientific consensus without necessarily being unreasonable. MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel wrote that labeling someone as an "alarmist" is "a particularly infantile smear considering what is at stake". He continued that using this "inflammatory terminology has a distinctly Orwellian flavor."Some media reports have used alarmist tactics to challenge the science related to global warming by comparing it with a purported episode of global cooling. In the 1970s, global cooling, a claim with limited scientific support was widely reported in the press.
Several media pieces have claimed that since the even-at-the-time-poorly-supported theory of global cooling was shown to be false, that the well-supported theory of global warming can also be dismissed. For example, an article in The Hindu by Kapista and Bashkirtsev wrote: "Who remembers today, they query, that in the 1970s, when global temperatures began to dip, many warned that we faced a new ice age? An editorial in The Time magazine on June 24, 1974, quoted concerned scientists as voicing alarm over the atmosphere 'growing gradually cooler for the past three decades', 'the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland,' and other harbingers of an ice age that could prove 'catastrophic.' Man was blamed for global cooling as he is blamed today for global warming", and the Irish Independent published an article claiming that "The widespread alarm over global warming is only the latest scare about the environment to come our way since the 1960s. Let's go through some of them. Almost exactly 30 years ago the world was in another panic about climate change. However, it wasn't the thought of global warming that concerned us. It was the fear of its opposite, global cooling. The doom-sayers were wrong in the past and it's entirely possible they're wrong this time as well." Numerous other examples exist.