Climate journalism in a changing media ecosystem: Assessing the production of climate change‐related news around the world

Abstract

Climate journalism gathers, evaluates, selects, and presents information about climate change, its characteristics, causes, and impacts, as well as ways to mitigate it, and distributes them via technical media to general and specialist audiences. It is an important source of information about climate change for many people. Currently, however, the media ecosystem surrounding climate journalism is changing, with economic conditions becoming more strenuous, more communicators joining the debate, and social media changing the affordances of communication. This advanced review synthesizes scholarship on both the status quo and the changes taking place in climate journalism in the Global North and the Global South. While it demonstrates that the scholarship has distinct gaps and biases, it does distill several robust findings. First, it shows that the organizational embedding of climate journalism is changing, with specialist reporters becoming scarce and working under more strenuous conditions and with the emergence of online‐born news media and niche sites specializing in climate journalism. It also suggests that few specialist climate journalists exist in the Global South. Second, it demonstrates that the range of roles available to climate journalists has diversified, with a shift from “gatekeeping” to “curating” roles. Third, it indicates that climate journalists’ relationships with their sources have changed. Elite sources have been, and still are, important, but their composition has shifted from scientists to a broader range of stakeholders. Correspondingly, there seems to be a strong and rising influence of stakeholder PR on climate journalism. This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication

Country-level conditions like prosperity, democracy, and regulatory culture predict individual climate change belief

“…4b). One interpretation of these observed non-monotonous relationships is that economic development and market liberalism may foster climate change belief up until a certain threshold because both variables promote the proliferation of the mass media quality necessary to broadcast climate change 25,26,64 . This positive effect might diminish once mass media quality is sufficiently saturated.…”

“…In particular, I examine whether the domestic presence of environmental NGOs (operationalized as environmental NGOs accredited to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 18 ) and the domestic presence of climate scientists (operationalized as scientific contributions to the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 19 ) predict individual climate change belief, as both actors are important climate change communicators [20][21][22] . I also analyze the role of economic development (as GDP per Capita 23 ) and civil liberties (operationalized with Freedom House' civil liberty rating 24 ) because qualitative studies indicate that mass media outlets in poor countries struggle to cover climate change 25,26 and that authoritarian states may repress the activities of environmental NGOs [27][28][29] . Moreover, I also estimate the degree to which exposure to climate change impacts [30][31][32] (measured with Global Adaptation Initiative's exposure index 33 ) and fossil fuel dependency 34 (both in terms of per capita emissions 35 and in carbon intensity per GDP 36 ) are associated with individual belief in human-made climate change.…”

Exploring the digital media ecology: insights from a study of healthy diets and climate change communication on digital and social media

“…Research into digital science communication has tended to focus either on specific communicator groups, e.g. scientists [Petersen, Vincent and Westerling, 2019;Collins, Shiffman and Rock, 2016;Wilkinson and Weitkamp, 2013] and journalists [Fahy and Nisbet, 2011;Schäfer and Painter, 2021], or on particular digital media platforms [e.g Milani, Weitkamp and Webb, 2020;Pavelle and Wilkinson, 2020;Saboia et al, 2018;Su et al, 2017;Muñoz Morcillo, Czurda and Robertson-von Trotha, 2016;Spartz et al, 2017]. Studies of scientists and researchers suggest some limited presence online, with a focus on platforms such as Twitter [Koivumäki and Wilkinson, 2020;Collins, Shiffman and Rock, 2016].…”

Democracy and Public Opinion Formation: How Illiberal Regimes Suppress Climate Change Concern

“…These observations are consistent with theoretical expectations. In many of the least developed countries, there are few civil society groups and specialized journalists that are interested and sufficiently equipped to publicly communicate climate change (Nguyen & Tran, 2019;Schäfer & Painter, 2020). Hence, providing civil liberties alone is not sufficient to increase climate change concern when there are no people who would cover climate change in the first place.…”