"Reporting on climate change: A computational analysis of U.S. newspapers and sources of bias, 1997–2017". (March 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bohr, Jeremiah
• Is Part Of: Global environmental change. Volume 61(2020)
• Publication Date: 2020-03
• Subjects: Climate change -- Newspaper coverage -- Text analysis -- Topic modeling; Environmental policy -- Periodicals; Human ecology -- Periodicals; Nature -- Effect of human beings on -- Periodicals; Environment -- Periodicals; Environnement -- Politique gouvernementale -- Périodiques; Écologie humaine -- Périodiques; Homme -- Influence sur la nature -- Périodiques; Environmental policy; Human ecology; Nature -- Effect of human beings on; Periodicals; Electronic journals; 333.7
• DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102038
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0959-3780

Abstract

Highlights: 28 topics related to climate change identified from 52 US newspapers over 20 years. Newspapers' partisan orientation shaped the prevalence of coverage for some topics. Conservative newspapers dedicated much more coverage to the Climategate scandal. Regional newspapers focused more on localized mitigation efforts. Newspaper's located in cities with high climate vulnerability highlight the salience of corporations, international agreements, emissions, and sea level rise in their coverage of climate change. Abstract: News organizations constitute key sites of science communication between experts and lay audiences, giving many individuals their basic worldview of complex topics like climate change. Previous researchers have studied climate change news coverage to assess accuracy in reporting and potential sources of bias. These studies typically rely on manually coding articles from a handful of prestigious outlets, not allowing comparisons with smaller newspapers or providing enough diversity to assess the influence of partisan orientation or localized climate vulnerability on content production. Making these comparisons, this study indicates that partisan orientation, scale of circulation, and vulnerability to climate change correlate with several topics present in U.S. newspaper coverage of climate change. After assembling a corpus of over 78, 000 articles covering two decades from 52 U.S. newspapers that are diverse in terms of geography, partisan orientation, scale of circulation, and objectively measured climate risk, a coherent set of latent topics were identified via an automated content analysis of climate change news coverage. Topic model results indicate that while outlet bias does not appear to impact the prevalence of coverage for most topics surrounding climate change, differences were evident for some topics based on partisan orientation, scale, or vulnerability status, particularly those relating to climate change denial, impacts, mitigation, or resource use. Overall, this paper provides a comprehensive study of U.S. newspaper coverage of climate change and identifies specific topics where outlet bias constitutes an important contextual factor.