Climate change and mass media

Rajbir Saha

(rajbirsaha1995@gmail.com)

Mass media is a critical factor in recognizing and understanding climate change and other related environmental issues. Climate change has significantly differed between countries regarding its reporting and context. More recently, several research initiatives in emerging and developing economies have begun to explore its media coverage, such as China, Bangladesh, India, Mexico, Peru. Mass media campaigns are one of the main policy instruments used to influence public opinion on specific topics. There has been a reasonably short-lived impact on public opinion in mass media as media coverage moves from topic to topic, even daily. Climate change in the USA has recently become a mainstream topic like climate change. Its impact is a significant challenge for the 21st century, which concerns both people and governments and constitutes a significant political concern. Therefore, the media has proven to be the principal source of climate change information. From which the public draws most of its knowledge. Specific qualitative and quantitative analyses have been carried out on the mass media reporting of climate change issues.

Some have described the rise and decline in media attention and others concentrated on factors behind media attention's cyclicality Extreme weather events, like the Katrina hurricane of 2005, the Haiyan typhoon of 2013, and the severity of heatwaves, led to increased media coverage of climate change. Furthermore, scientific activities such as the releases of the 2007 and 2013/14 intergovernmental panels on climate change reports have become international media events United Nations Climate Change Conferences (UNCC). Therefore, the media has a significant effect on shaping public perception and opinion on such issues. Although environmental scientists and social movements have been concerned with climate change since the 1980s, mass media reporting has turned it into one of the most complex and influential environmental issues in global political circles. Researchers Mazur and Lee suggested that the level of public concern regarding environmental issues is often influenced by the substantive content of news reports and the amount of media attention it receives.

The integral role played by the media is not surprising, as it is still the main source of information and opinion for millions of readers and viewers—and voters—through newspapers, magazines, television, radio and the internet. As people gain most of their political, economic or other news from the media, so they do with scientific stories.

Various studies have shown that the public gathers much of its knowledge about science from the mass media with television and daily newspapers being the primary sources of information. Given their wide reach, it is therefore important to investigate the media's coverage of scientific topics and how it influences both science and policy. In this viewpoint, we survey the media's portrayal of climate science and man-made climate change—dubbed 'global warming, or anthropogenic climate change—and its coverage in the USA and UK as an important example of how science, politics and the media intersect and interact. More specifically, we explore how external influences and internal factors shape and define media coverage of climate science. At this time, the media—mainly newspapers—were at the early stages of rapid and large changes. Their reach was still limited by various constraints, such as state control over the public sphere, legacies of colonialism, low literacy rates and technological limitations. However, increasing literacy and the invention of mass-circulation print presses tremendously expanded their reach and influence in both the USA and the UK, when newspapers, at least in urban centres, became available for a few pennies. Their wider reach, coupled with advertising revenue, also meant that newspapers became more economically attractive, which resulted in development from small papers to large news businesses.

Indeed, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of the first media conglomerates, exemplified by US newspaper magnates Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. As a consequence of these developments, the media became increasingly powerful social, political, economic and cultural institutions that were entrenched in society.