Journal
ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LETTERS
Volume 16, Issue 9, Pages -Publisher
IOP Publishing Ltd
DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac14eb
Keywords
climate change; global warming; balance; bias; print media; content analysis
Funding
- University of Colorado Boulder Libraries Open Access Fund
- University of Colorado Boulder Environmental Studies Program
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This research systematically updated the understanding of how print media represent evidence of human contributions to climate change, showing that coverage accuracy has generally improved over time. However, conservative outlets like Canada's National Post and the U.K.'s Daily Mail had less accurate coverage compared to other sources.
Through this research, we systematically updated and expanded understanding of how the print media represent evidence of human contributions to climate change. We built on previous research that examined how the journalistic norm of balanced reporting contributed to informationally biased print media coverage in the United States (U.S.) context. We conducted a content analysis of coverage across 4856 newspaper articles over 15 years (2005-2019) and expanded previous research beyond U.S. borders by analyzing 17 sources in five countries: the United Kingdom (U.K.), Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S. We found that across all the years of analysis, 90% of the sample accurately represented climate change. In addition, our data suggests that scientifically accurate coverage of climate change is improving over time. We also found that media coverage was significantly less accurate in 2010 and significantly more accurate in 2015, in comparison to the sample average. Additionally, Canada's National Post, Australia's Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and the U.K.'s Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday (all historically conservative outlets) had significantly less accurate coverage of climate change over this time period than their counterparts.
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