Balance as bias, resolute on the retreat? Updates & analyses of newspaper coverage in the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and Canada over the past 15 years

Abstract

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.

When fairness is flawed: Effects of false balance reporting and weight-of-evidence statements on beliefs and perceptions of climate change.

“…Between data collection for Experiment 2 (May 2020-June 2020) and Experiment 3 (August 2021), there was increased popular awareness of and exposure to scientific consensus on climate change and climate change impacts. Recent articles have also highlighted that journalists seem to be moving away from false balanced reporting towards accurate representations of climate change consensus (Boykoff et al, 2021; McAllister et al, 2021). Participants’ pre-reading perceptions also suggest they may have been attuned to consensus: They provided significantly higher pre-reading ratings of expert consensus ( M = 5.61, SD = 1.52) than did participants in Experiment 2 ( M = 5.14, SD = 1.66), t (242.58) = −2.41, p = .017, d = −0.29.…”

Russian climate scepticism: an understudied case

“…Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) explain that between 1988 and 2002, US journalists actively sought out sceptical scientists and other sceptical voices in order to 'balance' their coverage of ACC, thus giving the impression that the scientific community was split on the issue. This problem was found to self-correct over time (McAllister et al 2021;Timm et al 2020, etc. ), but its early manifestation meant that western media norms and values skewed the climate change debate away from questions of what should be done towards questions of whether ACC is a real problem (McCright and Dunlap 2003).…”

Coal versus Coral

“…The predominance of news stories framing the ACF's legal challenge as an activist tactic was not surprising: the ideological cultures and stances of conservative outlets in Australia, and elsewhere, have contributed to their silence on climate change (McAllister et al 2021). Notably, Rupert Murdoch's media empireparticularly his Australian newspaper The Australianhave for decades maintained a strategy to advance Murdoch's political views in which climate-change denial looms large (Bacon and Nash 2012;McKnight 2005McKnight , 2012McKnight and Hobbs 2017).…”