An Oxford University study of climate change coverage in six countries suggests that newspapers in the UK and the US have given far more column space to the voices of climate skeptics than the press in Brazil, France, India and China. More than 80 per cent of the times that skeptical voices were included, they were in pieces in the UK and US press, according to the research.
The study, “Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate Skepticism”, shows that 44 per cent of all the articles in which skeptical voices were included were in the opinion pages and editorials, as compared with the news pages. It also finds that in the UK and the US, the ‘right-leaning’ press carried significantly more climate skeptical opinion pieces than the ‘left-leaning’ newspapers.
A team of researchers led by James Painter, from the University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, examined more than 3,000 articles from two different newspaper titles in each country during two separate periods. In each country (apart from China), the newspapers were selected to represent divergent political viewpoints. The periods studied were February to April 2007 and mid-November 2009 to mid-February 2010, which included the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen and ‘Climategate’.
Although the researchers discovered a link between the amount of coverage given to climate skeptics and the political viewpoint of newspaper titles in the UK and the US, this link did not appear in the other study countries – Brazil, France and India. In the latter, few skeptical voices appeared and there was little or no difference between that country’s two selected titles in the amount of space given to the skeptical viewpoints. In all the countries, politicians represented around a third of all the skeptical voices quoted or mentioned, with the UK and US newspapers much more likely to quote politicians than the press in other countries.
The ‘Poles Apart’ study defines climate skeptical voices as those skeptical that the world is warming or those that question the influence of humans in the warming. It also includes those skeptical about the pace and extent of its impacts, or about whether urgent action and government spending are necessary to combat it.
James Painter, RISJ researcher and Head of the Journalism Fellowship Programme, said, “There are politicians in the UK and the US, who espouse some variation of climate skepticism. Both countries also have organizations for ‘climate change skeptics’ that provide a skeptical voice for the media, particularly in those media outlets that are more receptive to this message. This is why we see more skeptical coverage in the Anglo-Saxon countries than we do in the other countries in the study where one or more of those factors appear to be absent.”
The research includes a detailed examination of several hundred articles in ten British national newspapers to see where views about climate skepticism receive the most coverage, and which skeptics and organizations are most quoted. The countries and media included in the study were Brazil (Folha de São Paulo, Estado de São Paulo), China (People’s Daily, Beijing Evening News), France (Le Monde, Le Figaro), India (Times of India, The Hindu), the UK (all ten national newspapers) and the USA (New York Times, Wall Street Journal).
The study was carried out with research assistance from the British Council, who also financed the study along with the European Climate Foundation and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.
James Painter worked as a journalist for several years at the BBC World Service in various capacities including Americas Executive Editor and head of the Spanish American Service. He has written extensively on climate change, the media and Latin America for several organizations and publications, including the BBC, the UNDP, Oxfam and Oxford Analytica. He is the author of the RISJ publications ‘Summoned by Science: Reporting Climate Change at Copenhagen’ and ‘Beyond and Counter-Hegemonic News: A Case Study of Al-Jazeera English and Telesur’.
Source: University of Oxford.
