Two-thirds of Americans want action on climate change, but people vastly underestimate public support for climate solutions and policy.
Historically, U.S. news outlets overrepresented views on climate change that went against scientific consensus. If news outlets are similarly overrepresenting opposition to climate policy, it could explain the discrepancy between public support and perception.
A new study led by researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder reveals that most television news segments about climate change don't cover policy. The work, published this week in the journal Environmental Research Communications, shows that while the total percentage of news segments that support climate policy matches public opinion, some news networks are highly polarized in their coverage.
"This means that people might not hear anything about solutions when they hear about the climate crisis in the news," said Ekaterina Landgren, who led the work as a lead author of the paper and former CIRES visiting fellow. "This in turn can shape what they think is normal or popular."
Landgren and her colleagues focused on 7 major television news networks — ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, and PBS — and identified news transcripts from April 2020 to April 2021 that contained the words "climate change" or "global warming." The team partnered with students from the CU Boulder Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS) to identify whether each transcript mentioned climate policy and if it did, whether it supported, opposed, or presented a neutral view.
"IBS was the perfect home for a project that needed both methodological rigor and a structured student research team," said Jeremiah Osborne-Gowey, co-author of the paper and former PhD student in Environmental Studies at CU Boulder and CIRES. "It was a partnership built around shared values: high-quality research and meaningful training."
When they compiled all the data together, the team discovered that two-thirds of television news coverage of climate change didn't mention climate policy at all.
"One of the biggest surprises is how often climate coverage skips policy entirely," Osborne-Gowey said. "That is a striking gap, because policy is where solutions live. But when policy is largely missing from coverage, so too are the pathways people can imagine for addressing the problem."
Among the segments that either supported or opposed climate policy, 71 percent expressed support. This roughly matches the actual level of public support for most climate policies.
But when they dug into the data from individual networks, they found that some climate policy coverage was highly polarized. For example, CNN presented mostly supportive or neutral views of climate policy, while Fox mostly covered opposing views. Because most Americans watch one or two outlets rather than the full media landscape, many viewers experience something far more skewed than the aggregate suggests.
"Aggregate balance masks real polarization," said Osborne-Gowey, who is now a research associate at IBS and an associate research scientist at Arizona State University. "Even if the overall system is balanced, lots of Americans do not experience it that way because they follow or "tune in" to particular outlets."
Despite these outlet-level differences, the team's results indicate that television news coverage of climate policy cannot explain the discrepancy between public support and people's perceptions of support in the U.S.
"TV news is only one aspect of the information environment," said Landgren, who is now a Dean's Sustainability Leaders Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. "We need to understand not just what the news covers, but also what news people are exposed to, how they share it on social media, and what they retain from it after they watch or read it."
