Learning about climate politics during COP 21: Explaining a diminishing knowledge gap

Abstract

A basic understanding of climate politics is necessary for citizens to assess their government’s policies. Media use is supposed to enable learning, while widening knowledge gaps. We analyze whether such a gap opened up in times of intense media coverage during the 2015 climate conference in Paris and explain learning through hierarchical regression analyses, drawing on a 3-month panel survey ( n = 1121) in Germany. We find a diminishing knowledge gap: people with low previous knowledge catch up on the better informed, but overall knowledge remained low and learning was limited. This suggests a ceiling effect: possibly journalistic media did not provide enough new information for the well-informed. Closing knowledge gaps may also be explained by the media system with public television and regional newspapers reaching broad segments of the population. Higher knowledge was predicted less by media use than by education, concern, and being male.

Success or Failure? News Framing of the COP26 Glasgow Summit and its Effects on Citizens’ Beliefs About Climate Change

“…Furthermore, this study focused on climate summits and climate change beliefs, contributing to this literature in particular while also raising questions about the character of the case. On the one hand, the study contributes to research on climate summits and climate opinion by implementing a unique research design allowing to capture the dynamic nature of mediated political events such as climate summits (Brüggemann et al 2017; De Silva-Schmidt et al 2022). Both our news content analysis and public opinion data illustrate how the Glasgow summit followed a dynamic with news coverage peaking at specific points reflecting intense moments of political negotiations.…”

“…To date however, there is only a handful of studies focusing on the potential effects of these large-scale events on public opinion (see Bakaki and Bernauer 2017; Brüggemann et al 2017; De Silva-Schmidt et al 2022). While these studies provide important knowledge on how climate summits shape public opinion, none focus on the framing of the summits by the news media.…”

Digital media’s portrayal of climate change challenges during COP27 climate summit

“…Some studies have explored media coverage of individual developed countries, while others have taken a cross-national approach. These studies illustrated the economic impacts and opportunities of climate change (Grittmann, 2014), the role of media in giving attention to important issues (Gurwitt et al, 2017) and what aspects of the multifaceted conference were actually covered (De Silva- Schmidt et al, 2022).…”

Work and the public understanding of science

“…Achterberg et al (2017) demonstrate that educational attainment is positively associated with trust in scientific institutions but not trust in scientific methods and that the gap between trust in institutions and methods is larger for those with less education. Our ability to shape public attitudes toward science through media, however, is limited because media organizations amplify or de-amplify certain topics and promote specific meanings, and there is great diversity in media sources, and information from media is interpreted in different ways depending on people’s backgrounds and ingrained beliefs (see Arnoldi, 2009; De Silva-Schmidt et al, 2022; Grien and MacNeil, 2022; Rekker, 2021).…”