Media Portrayal of Climate Change
Dec. 17, 2021
Austin, TX – A study published in October in the journal Environmental Research Letters found that over 99% of peer-reviewed scientific literature agrees that contemporary climate change is human caused. Yet the media portrayal of the topic often suggests otherwise.
Public perception of climate change is affected by media coverage, and experts say much of that coverage is lacking at a time that planetary warming has become a crisis. Allowing non-experts to speak on the issue presents climate change as a debate. Lack of coverage of climate policy solutions casts anxieties among alarmed Americans.
The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication created the Global Warming’s Six Americas based on an extensive, in-depth survey given since 2008. Its creators aimed to distinguish and categorize American media audiences into how they view and perceive global warming and climate change information.
Lucy Atkinson, an environmental communications expert at the University of Texas at Austin, said the Six Americas helps communicators determine how to target and frame a message to specific audiences.
“As a communicator, it’s really helpful to know who your audience is,” she said. “We never have a homogenous audience.”
The Six Americas exemplifies just that. The “dismissive” category of the Six Americas, at only 8%, represents a population of people who do not believe climate change is occurring, that it is human caused, or that it is a threat. Those in the “doubtful” range, meaning they don’t think it is happening or believe it is just a natural occurrence, is slightly higher at 12%.
The “disengaged” and “cautious” categories represent the middle ground. Only 6% of Americans fall under the “disengaged” title, meaning they rarely pay attention to climate change and hear little about it in the media. Nineteen percent of the population are “cautious,” or still remain undecided about the level of threat climate change poses.
Twenty nine percent of Americans are concerned about human-caused global warming and support climate policies, but still believe impacts won’t be felt until the future. The alarmed population, at 26%, are knowledgeable about human-caused global warming and strongly support policies, yet many do not know how to solve the problem.
This survey brings to light multiple issues within the media portrayal of climate change. Less than ten percent of Americans doubt climate change and over 99% of peer-reviewed scientific studies attribute human causation to climate change. Yet some media outlets still give voice to those who perpetuate the idea that climate change is non-existent or not a threat.
Samara Zuckerbrod, the director of the Campus Environmental Center at The University of Texas at Austin, said when the media brings attention to things that are not true, it diverts from the actual issues at hand.
“A lot of Americans agree that climate change is real,” she said. “The media kind of presents it as a debatable issue that has two equal sides.”
The other issue that can be extracted from the Yale survey is that even among the majority of Americans who are “alarmed” on the issue of climate change, they still do not have a good grasp of the solutions.
Atkinson brought up the quintessential image of climate change: the polar bear and her cub stranded on a broken-off ice sheet. She referred to this as an example of framing the issue in a way that doesn’t resonate with the intended audience.
“Oftentimes, and it’s changing, but we present that issue as something that feels very distant,” she said. “It’s really hard to change behaviors and habits. So doing that panic messaging doesn’t work.”
Valerie Salinas-Davis, an environmental communications lecturer at UT Austin, said that solution messaging is all about practicality. In a recent blog post about how to have a sustainable and “green” holiday, she talked about the issue of pushing unrealistic expectations.
“Transportation is the worst for carbon emissions,” Salinas-Davis said. “And well, guess what? Tomorrow’s December when I write my blog and no one’s going to cancel their flight because they read my blog. It really is about a certain practicality and not really pushing for unrealistic, extremist things for people to do.”
Media outlets have a large responsibility to the public to portray not only vast but also accurate coverage of climate change.
The Media and Climate Change Observatory (MECCO) specifically analyzes these facets of coverage. The analysis gathered data on five major U.S. newspapers, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times and tracked the amount of climate change and global warming articles produced. Between the years 2000-2021, the total number of articles written by these five publications increased from 81 articles in 2000 to 1,049 written in 2021 so far.
Max Boykoff, the lead project investigator of MECCO, said he developed the project to help garner a better understanding of the quantity of coverage for the academic community, the media and businesses.
“It fills a role that’s not otherwise filled,” he said. “It’s been used on the floor of the Senate to make a point about media coverage of climate change, increasing and decreasing for various reasons.”
Boykoff stated that he hopes the information is used to start conversations and invite reflection on how the media represents climate change. Specifically, he referenced how he thinks it should be used to analyze the content of coverage.
“More coverage doesn’t necessarily mean better coverage,” Boykoff said. “So there can be outlets that are producing a lot of content, but it could be coming in very confusing ways. At least it gives these media organizations some data to reflect, whether they choose to do so or not, about the work that they’re doing and the coverage that they’re giving to climate change and global warming.”
A new tactic that may solve some of the issues of climate coverage is breaking ground in the media: humor. This technique has been adopted by late-night talk shows when delivering a news wrap segment. John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, regularly covers news topics through comedy. In 2019, he delivered a roughly 20-minute segment on the Green New Deal.
“If you knew nothing else about the Green New Deal, you now know that everyone’s talking about it and it was booed at a Trump rally,” Oliver said. “Therefore, it is A: Famous and B: Probably good.”
A study released in April in the journal PNAS analyzes the role of humor and emotion in sorting out misinformation. The study says that about 30% of Americans “learned something about politics from satirical programs such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Saturday Night Live.” It argues that humor can draw attention to issues that wouldn’t normally be in the spotlight, like science. The study also reports that humor can help guide people to make better evaluations of sources of information.
Atkinson said humor brings the audience’s defenses down in a way that allows them to be more emotional about the content they are absorbing.
“They are very powerful ways of communicating about issues like the environment in a way that the audience doesn’t think they’re being lectured to or admonished or chastised for doing the wrong thing,” she said.
It’s important as a consumer to understand how information is disseminated and more importantly, how to spot discrepancies and fill the gaps. Not only does climate change coverage need to span across all segments of news, but it must be factual and solution-oriented.
“It’s just about making those connections and it can just be subtle and slight, but consistently,” Atkinson said. “So that over the course of a year, it’s not one single article that’s going to make that impact.”