Does The Media Convey Climate Science Accurately?

11/17/20224 min read

"Mass-media coverage of climate change is not simply a random amalgam of newspaper articles and television segments; rather, it is a social relationship between scientists, policy actors and the public that is mediated by such news packages." (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2007)

In this post I will consider the portrayals of climate science in mainstream media in the USA, being the top historical carbon emitter (Carbon Brief, 2021), and the UK.

In my view, in recent decades, the mainstream media in the 2 countries has not conveyed climate science accurately, but the accuracy of coverage and frequency of coverage has since improved significantly.

Boykoff and Boykoff (2007) analysed newspaper and TV coverage in the USA from 1998 to 2004 of anthropogenic contribution to climate change. Their research led them to conclude that “adherence to first-order journalistic norms - personalization, dramatization, and novelty - significantly influence the employment of second-order norms - authority-order and balance - and that this has led to informationally deficient mass-media coverage of this crucial issue”.

Personalization perpetuates the idea “news should be about individuals and personalities rather than group dynamics or social processes” (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2007). This approach to reporting shifts the reader’s focus to their own relationship to climate change which, in the case of a matter of such magnitude, cannot simply be viewed through the lens of me and mine. When news of climate change is dramatized or sensationalised, the effect is not only the “blocking out of news that does not hold an immediate sense of excitement or controversy”, but more seriously, to “downplay complex policy information, the workings of government institutions, and the bases of power behind the central characters” (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2007), resulting in increased risk of inaccuracy or misrepresentation of climate science. The novelty norm is evinced in the “‘issue-of-the-month syndrome’ that “allows persistent, and growing, environmental problems to slide out of sight if there is nothing ‘new’ to report” (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2007). Because climate change is an ongoing and daily development, application of the journalistic norm of novelty results in news of climate change being regarded as not sufficiently newsworthy.

In his 2011 paper entitled ‘Poles Apart – The International Reporting of Climate Scepticism’, which analysed over 3,000 print articles in 6 countries including the UK and the USA, James Painter wrote:-

“[In] the USA the debate about the causes of global warming and what to do about it has become a proxy for a debate about politics – big government versus small government, free markets or government intervention, individual freedom against the power of the establishment.”

Because climate scepticism in the USA “has particularly strong roots, is well-organised, and better funded” – for example by conservative think tanks and/or fossil fuel companies – climate change in the USA was “frequently viewed through a political and not a scientific lens” (Painter, 2011).

Balance and bias in reporting, or “balance as bias”, has been a thorny issue in the UK media, and Painter (2011) observed that it also manifested in the climate science debate – “sceptics frequently attack what they call the ‘liberal consensus’ found in the BBC and other media outlets for overzealously following the mainstream scientific view and not allowing enough space to points of view that oppose them.”

In a 2014 inquiry report by the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons, the Committee reached the following conclusion:

“106. The Government’s hands-off approach to engaging with the public and the media, relying heavily on scientists as the most prominent voice, has a resulted in a vacuum that has allowed inaccurate arguments to flourish with little effective challenge.

107. If the Government is to demonstrate its climate policies are evidence based, it needs to be an authoritative and trusted voice which explains the current state of climate science. It is important that climate science is presented separately from any subsequent policy response.”

This sentiment – that climate science in the UK is perhaps too closely interlinked with policy and/or politics – was echoed in a 2016 paper by Schmid-Petri and Arlt, which found that “climate discourse in the British media is mainly political in nature rather than scientific”, and that “in Britain climate scepticism became more strongly politically motivated over the past years”.

However, developments in more recent years indicate that reporting across the board is starting to represent climate science more accurately.

A 2021 study of 4,856 newspaper articles over 15 years in 5 countries including the UK and the USA found that “90% of the sample accurately represented climate change”, and that “scientifically accurate coverage of climate change is improving over time” (McAllister et al, 2021). Similarly, in 2022, the IPCC reported that “the media representation of climate science has increased and become more accurate over time” (IPCC, 2022).

McAllister et al (2021) caution that while accuracy has increased, debates appear to have shifted away from outright denial and toward “‘discourses of delay’ that focus on undermining support for specific policies meant to address climate change”; further, “there is not always a direct relationship between the accuracy of individuals’ climate knowledge and their beliefs about climate change”.

Achieving accuracy of representation of climate science in mainstream media is only one step on the path toward effective climate change adaptation and mitigation.

In the words of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, “Knowledge is only power if knowledge is put to the struggle for power.”

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