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The Desert Sun
April 19, 2016
by Sammy Roth
If you’ve heard the presidential candidates talk about climate change, you’d probably guess it’s one of America’s most divisive issues. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have described global warming as one of the greatest threats facing the United States, while Donald Trump has said he’s “not a big believer.” Ted Cruz has described climate change as a “pseudoscientific theory” designed by liberals to give government more power.
But polls show that a vast majority of Americans believe climate change is happening — and young people especially want the United States to do something about it.
Other experts believe that if scientists and the media did a better job of communicating straightforward, unbiased information, some climate skeptics might be swayed.
Max Boykoff, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, has studied media coverage of climate change for two decades. News organizations, he noted, continue to give outsize coverage to climate deniers like “Greatest Hoax” author Inhofe, who famously threw a snowball on the floor of the Senate last year in a scientifically meaningless attempt to disprove global warming.
“When you subject a complicated, complex, multifaceted issue to the pressures, the norms, the practices of everyday journalism, you end up with some surface-level stories,” Boykoff said.
Boykoff has tracked climate change coverage in major newspapers, finding that the volume of coverage ebbs and flows with events like last year’s Paris climate summit. But overall, the issue isn’t getting a lot of attention. Media Matters for America recently found that the four major TV news networks — CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox — spent just 146 minutes covering climate change during the entirety of last year. ABC devoted just 13 minutes to the topic. Read more …
