In 2016, CBS television network chairman Les Moonves declared Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy “damn good” for business. “The money’s rolling in,” he enthused. But what’s good for networks might not profit others. Media Matters for America reports that during 2017, TV networks generally narrowed climate change coverage to the new presidential administration’s statements and actions, neglecting critical climate stories.
The 12 February report from Media Matters—which labels itself progressive—uses quantification, bar graphs, and short, crisp paragraphs in analyzing 2017 climate coverage by nightly news and Sunday shows at CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, and Fox.
The report emphasizes that 79% of that coverage focused on the Trump administration, with “heavy attention” to the Paris climate-accord withdrawal and climate denial. Almost half of all climate segments were about the withdrawal. Of the Sunday shows’ 95 minutes of coverage, the Trump focus dominated 94.
The report also charges that the networks scanted or ignored “real-life impacts on people, the economy, national security,” and extreme weather “in a year when weather disasters killed hundreds of Americans, displaced hundreds of thousands more, and cost the economy in excess of $300 billion.”
The networks’ heavy Trump focus in 2017 followed what Media Matters found was their 2016 failure to air even one report on how either presidential candidate’s win could affect climate policy or climate change itself. After Trump won, the networks allegedly “played catch-up,” belatedly covering what they had failed to warn about. An earlier Media Matters report charged that, in 2016, networks’ total climate coverage “cratered.”
Undercoverage complaints
The current report emphasizes climate stories that the networks mainly neglected. Only 26 segments aired on rollbacks of climate protections, with only 16 specifically on Environmental Protection Agency efforts to repeal or weaken President Obama’s Clean Power Plan establishing limits on coal-plant emissions.
To protest the protection rollbacks, a People’s Climate March took place in Washington and 375 satellite locations on the Trump administration’s 100th day, 29 April 2017. Media Matters reports that the organizers estimated 200 000 protesters on the National Mall—and that on the Sunday news shows, the march got “almost no coverage.”
Similarly, the networks “did not mention climate change in a single segment” about the Trump administration’s support of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. The report notes that both stir “strong opposition from Native American tribes and environmental activists, partly because they would lead to increased carbon dioxide emissions and worsen climate change.”
The report also indicts undercoverage of climate change implications for the health of plants, wildlife, and humans. But it conveys something like encouragement concerning coverage of the threat of sea-level rise, the subject of seven segments each from CBS and PBS—though ABC and Fox left it unaddressed. Media Matters observes that a “number of studies published in 2017 found that sea-level rise is proceeding faster, and may be more severe, than previous research indicated.”
The report gives other examples of “important and alarming developments in climate-related scientific research” from 2017:
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that 2016 was earth’s hottest year on record. In March, scientists reported that sea ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic was at its lowest-ever levels, and three months later scientists concluded that 30 percent of the world’s population is currently at risk of experiencing deadly heat waves. In October, a report found that tropical forests, which were once thought to be carbon sinks, are actually a net carbon source. In November, the Global Carbon Project reported that global carbon dioxide emissions are again on the rise after remaining flat for three years. December saw the release of research in the developing field of attribution science, which assesses how climate change has influenced individual extreme weather events: Two studies quantified the extent to which climate change boosted Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall, and another set of studies found that human-caused climate change was a “significant driver” for 21 of 27 extreme weather events in 2016.
Unfortunately, that passage ends this way: “Many of these developments received no network coverage at all.”
The report does note that the “PBS NewsHour interviewed or quoted more scientists in its climate coverage than all the other networks combined.” It adds, “CBS interviewed or quoted 14 scientists, NBC featured 10, ABC featured three, and Fox featured none.”
Along those lines, Media Matters also reports that for “two consecutive years, the Sunday morning news shows have not featured any scientists in their climate coverage. The high point was in 2014, when Sunday shows had a combined seven scientists on as guests to discuss climate change.”
Maybe undercoverage of climate science and climate scientists helps explain this “key finding,” one of six:
Despite 2017 being a record year for weather and climate disasters, the corporate broadcast networks rarely covered the link between climate change and extreme weather events in the US. They aired only four total segments that discussed climate change in the context of disasters that happened last year, including just two that mentioned climate change in the context of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, or Maria.
Stanford University earth scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, the lead author of a new Science Advances paper that estimates the probability of extreme weather events in the future, backs up that record-year claim. He calls 2017 the costliest on record for “damages from extreme weather and climate events” and considers the rising costs “one of many signs that we are not prepared.” In mid-February, USA Today, Time, Scientific American, and MIT Technology Review reported the paper’s warnings.
Huffpost and the Washington Post have reported on the Media Matters effort. So have Mother Jones and the Guardian, but with a twist seen vividly in this line from the Guardian: “The good news is that the annual analysis done by Media Matters for America found that in 2017, network news coverage of climate change soared.”
Soared? The Guardian’s next line cancels that word’s effect: “The bad news is that most of it was focused on Trump’s historically stupid withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.”
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today’s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
