Climate Change Coverage on Television News
It is via the media that the general public learns about climate change. They might have a substantial impact on how people see the situation. To be most effective, television news will have a high degree of Visual Immediacy And Authoritative Presentation. Agenda-setting and framing are only two examples of how television news may influence public opinion positively or negatively depending on the study (Pearce et al.).
TV is an important channel for individuals to keep up with scientific news, even in a fragmented media landscape driven mostly by internet communication. As a result, researchers have spent the past several decades mapping the substance of television news reporting on climate change and its impact on public opinion and knowledge (Boykoff and Yulsman). There is evidence in this study to imply that climate change coverage on television has been distorted by journalists adhering to professional standards such as balance and originality, as well as by economic and social forces. A content analysis of U.S. network television news stories indicated that they tend to stress dramatic consequences and images, disputes between political groupings and personalities, as well as ambiguity around climate science and policy.
Both sides have used journalistic ideals of balance and impartiality to boost their voices on climate change coverage on television. Ideological arguments over climate change have found a prominent voice in the highly opinionated 24-hour cable news networks in recent years (Barkemeyer et al.). Fox News has been utilized by a concerted climate denial effort in the United States to undermine climate science. The coverage on Fox News is disproportionately negative toward climate change and scientists. More climate change coverage is available on CNN and MSNBC than on the other two networks. While MSNBC focuses on the anti-climate change stance of conservatives, CNN provides conflicting signals. There is evidence from surveys and experiments that these tendencies in climate change television news coverage have a significant impact on public opinion. They may, in particular, exacerbate public misunderstanding and indifference and encourage high partisanship among the general American population (Wetts).
When it comes to reporting on climate change for the general public, the news media play a crucial role. A large percentage of the general public does not read primary scientific literature often (Schmid-Petri et al.). While the consequences of climate change are not immediately visible to the naked eye, it is difficult to predict how they will evolve in the future. To make climate change understandable to a broader audience, media outlets play a critical role. There is a growing consensus among academics that science and the media are inseparably linked (Regenberg). Because most people are exposed to scientific topics, such as climate change, via media, “science as mediated reality” has been coined as a term for this phenomenon. Mediated realities can alter public views of scientific matters like climate change.
The news media has been covering climate change since the late 1980s at the very least, although in a sporadic fashion. Scientists, environmental groups, and some policymakers have argued with a growing conviction that climate change is a result of human activity and will have severe negative effects on the world. Despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that human climate change is both real and urgent, public opinion, particularly in the United States, has been generally indifferent. Among the more than two dozen topics that the majority of Americans believe the government should handle, fighting climate change is constantly at the bottom (Okoliko and de Wit). While liberals and Democrats have shown growing worried about climate change and stronger support for initiatives to address it since the late 1990s, conservatives have grown increasingly skeptical of climate change, with some even disputing its existence (Boulianne et al.).
Journalistic Ideals and Partisan Coverage
Television news, due to its visual immediacy and authoritative presentation, has long been claimed to have a powerful impact on viewers. Researchers have known for decades that the agenda-setting and framing techniques used by television news may have a significant impact on public opinion. Furthermore, the ability of television media to persuade and polarize has grown as its style of reporting has shifted from a straight-news model on broadcast networks to an opinionated, political one on cable (Sonnett).
Discourse on climate change is adversely affected by Trumpism and Fox News because its viewers, many of whom embrace unorthodox beliefs and political views, such as Republicans who support Trump. According to surveys comparing the beliefs of viewers of non-conservative media like Fox News to viewers of conservative media outlets like CNN and MSNBC, as well as the output of stories and covers, Fox News airs significantly more stories that question the existence of human-caused climate change than stories that accept these scientific claims (Hoewe et al.).
Informational bias is compounded by factors such as the economic and competitive pressures encountered by news organizations as well as tight deadlines and limited space and time. The average news package duration on network television in 2012 was 142 seconds, unchanged from 2007’s average of 140 seconds. Complexity and ambiguity in climate research, and science in general, cannot be adequately conveyed in the quick glimpses typical of television news (Tandoc et al.). Journalists may find it simpler to simply give voice to the critics of scientific research and findings rather than properly contextualize their coverage.
Fox News has been a refuge for climate change deniers for the last decade, protecting viewers from evidence showing humans are raising global temperatures. Among conservatives, maybe no other news organization has done as much to solidify the belief that global warming is a hoax as the New York Times.
A major goal of the Trump administration has been to pull back policies aimed at addressing global climate change. At an event in Washington, D.C. on June 1, 2017, President Trump said he will withdraw his country from the Paris Commitment, an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to avert the worst effects of global warming (Selby). The United States is the only significant emitter in the world to attempt to renegotiate the deal, and it will not be able to do so until after the November 2020 election.
It was the Obama administration’s efforts that allowed President Trump to tear back climate regulations since Congress was hesitant to take anything. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases may be controlled as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The Clean Power Plan, a cornerstone of President Obama’s administration’s attempt to decrease GHG emissions, was established using the Clean Air Act. Since its inception, the plan has been the subject of legal challenges since it sought to limit emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the electricity sector by preventing new coal plants that do not include carbon capture and storage. It enabled a comprehensive approach to compliance, including demand management and other techniques beyond the fence line of power facilities; opponents contended that the Obama administration did not have the jurisdiction to regulate in this fashion (BBC).
The Role of Media in Public Understanding of Climate Change
Network news coverage of climate change has not been explicitly studied in terms of the effects of other characteristics, such as the focus on threat information in the absence of a clear efficacy message and the use of spectacular imagery. However, the results from several experimental studies are telling. According to a study, news items that included information on government efforts to combat climate change and also included information about the effects of climate change improved participants’ optimism and lowered their anxiety; this, in turn, led to a more climate-related engagement. Furthermore, the message that people may take action to improve climatic conditions enhanced subjective sentiments of hope. A lack of efficacy information in network TV news reports may be preventing positive emotional responses from the people and encouraging indifference or even skepticism. Prior research has shown that conflict framing in TV news — by emphasizing the self-interested objectives of political actors—can produce high levels of cynicism about government, politics, and policy formulation (Park). This is a significant element of network climate change coverage. Untested, but it’s plausible that a similar process is playing out in the context of global warming.
The use of moving visuals separates television news from other types of news. A news article may be framed by images, which can direct the reader’s attention and structure their views of the story’s content. When it comes to framing, images are particularly powerful because of their analogic and indexical qualities, making them more likely to be taken at face value than words. Aside from drawing in viewers and helping them retain details in news reports, the impact that images have on how people feel about climate change is difficult to overstate. It is clear that dramatic, threat-based climate change visuals, such as those representing floods and droughts, enhanced the perceived relevance of climate change, even though no previous study has separated these effects. The same visuals, on the other hand, made them feel powerless to stop climate change.
To summarize, research shows that network news has several key implications on public perception and awareness of climate change. Some evidence suggests that the amount of media attention given to climate change influences the public’s level of concern about it, although the evidence is mixed. When climate change coverage emphasizes ambiguity or controversy, it serves to raise public skepticism. In addition, television news coverage may signal viewers to follow elite political signals on climate change, resulting in ideological polarization of climate change views and understanding (Byrne). There is more polarization when climate change is discussed in the context of national politics, but less polarization when climate change is discussed in the framework of scientific news.
Climate change awareness is not promoted by television news, although this is dependent on the sort of news that people pay attention to, with science-based coverage boosting knowledge and politically oriented coverage diminishing it. More study is needed, but it appears that conflict framing, limited efficacy information, and spectacular, threat-depicting imagery and narratives in climate change television news reports may contribute to public disengagement with climate change and, in particular, foster a sense of disempowerment and cynicism among the general public (Kuthe et al.).
Television News and Public Opinion
Getting the message through that climate change is real and urgent is one of the most challenging aspects of climate change communication. Because of this, the coverage of the climate crisis has been skewed by an information bias that stems from journalistic norms that dictate the selection and substance of news stories (Onuoha et al.). News dramas stress the crisis over continuity and reduce nuanced information about politics and the power sources that are behind the major protagonists. There’s no novelty in a problem that comes up every month, so it’s not seen as newsworthy because it isn’t perceived as a novel. Governments, public authorities, and corporate executives are often the primary sources of information that journalists rely on (in the case of the United States, official sources have presented contrary positions to international scientific consensus). There is a healthy balance between the thousands of world-renowned climate scientists who believe in the reality of climate change and the handful of deniers who have not published their doubts in peer-reviewed journals (Haltinner and Sarathchandra). As a result, a sense of uncertainty is conveyed through the exaltation of both positions, even if one is a minority within the scientific community. Climate skepticism is possible because of people’s active reluctance to accept disturbing information (Calyx and Low). People in wealthy countries are particularly prone to this type of behavior because they are unaware of the effects of climate change on their daily lives and view climate change mitigation as a prohibitively expensive process.
Conclusion
This media outlet’s lack of coverage of climate change and the denialist attitude it takes reveals a lack of interest in the topic, even if there wasn’t much of it. A newspaper for example is a political player with the power to influence the way decisions are made in government. Influence organizations, political parties, social movements, governments, and the general public are all included in its sphere of operation. They may choose the information to include, remove and/or prioritize from a variety of various sources.
However, in this regard, Fox News’ lack of coverage of climate change, which broadcasts on average three times less news than the rest of the media, shows a level of denialism that is less obvious than in Breitbart, but which also diminishes the importance of this problem and thus makes it more difficult for the public to grasp its significance. Skeptical news in this media source used the strategies of neutralizing climate change denial blame, denouncing the condemner, and appealing for more allegiance, to support their claims.
As a result of the wide range of material that is transmitted by the media, we are better equipped to grasp the world around us. Articles in the U.S. media that take a stance on the climate change issue have been published. However, this viewpoint is also represented in the selection of commenters in opinion columns, the selection of material, the hierarchy of information, and the fact that certain protagonists are given more prominence than others. The polarization and politicization of the climate phenomenon have led to an information bias in the coverage of climate news by the Democratic and Republican political-oriented media, which confirms previous research on the predominance of denialist positions in Republican-oriented media. It is the media, not politicians, that engage in this process of public debate by delivering statements to either confront or deny the impending climate catastrophe. This does not change the fact that they are corporate-owned organizations, and as such, their operations might be adversely impacted by legislation that emphasizes environmental well-being, ecosystem sustainability, and resource sustainability above economic profit. The Liberal democratic system is threatened by excessive polarization because it leads to social and political confrontation, which makes political compromise, much alone agreement, almost difficult.
References
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