» CU Boulder CIRES Report in Aljazeera on hedging language

Journalists believed to possibly hedge when considering climate change by Wilson Dizard in Aljazeera America The Scrutineer on June 3, 2014

It’s not your imagination, newspapers do plenty of hedging when describing the effects of climate change. And according to one new study, these “hedging” words are on the rise — although it’s not entirely clear why.

Experts at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) looked at climate change stories in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, along with Spanish newspapers El Mundo and El Pais, between 2001 and 2007, and found, especially in the American papers, a marked increase of words like “almost, speculative, could, believe, consider, blurry, possible and projecting.”

“The results showed that in 2001, the U.S. papers used 189 hedging words or expressions per 10,000 words printed while the Spanish papers used 107,” according to the CU-Boulder release. “In 2007, the number of hedging words and expressions used per 10,000 words rose to 267 in the U.S. and to 136 in Spain.” Read more…

Photo by Roger H. Goun