Major Media Outlets and Climate Change Action: Comparing US Media Coverage of the Green New Deal

Bhatti, S. J.; Jones, Bridget; Uppalapati, Sri Saahitya; Kristiansen, Svein

doi:10.1080/17524032.2021.1995457

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…The absence of evidence skeptics and skepticism in the ABC and BBC coverage is due mainly to a change in company policy whereby the presence of evidence skeptics is largely to be avoided or reduced (see Supplementary Notes). In the USA, there is a sharp distinction between Fox and other channels, which is both a reflection and cause of increasing polarization in both news treatments and consumption of climate change news [59][60][61] .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nor is it possible to ascertain the extent to which our findings were driven by the nature of the IPCC report (based mainly on climate science or evidence but with some policy implications-see Table 2). However, research on the coverage of the Green New Deal (GND, i.e., a policy initiative) on Fox and CNN suggests that in both US media, skepticism of the GND was higher than skepticism of the science of climate change (although the latter was still present), and criticism of the GND was much more common on the rightwing channel, Fox 59 . This finding and our results would suggest that the balance between evidence and response skepticism is related to the type of climate topic the media are covering.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Climate delay discourses present in global mainstream television coverage of the IPCC’s 2021 report

Painter

Ettinger

Holmes

et al. 2023

Commun Earth Environ

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Recent scholarship suggests that groups who oppose acting on climate change have shifted their emphasis from attacking the credibility of climate science itself to questioning the policies intended to address it, a position often called ‘response skepticism’. As television is the platform most used by audiences around the world to receive climate information, we examine 30 news programmes on 20 channels in Australia, Brazil, Sweden, the UK and USA which included coverage of the 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the Physical Science. Using manual quantitative content analysis, we find that skepticism about the science of climate change is still prevalent in channels that we have classified as ‘right-wing’, but largely absent from channels classified as ‘mainstream’. Forms of response skepticism are particularly common in ‘right-wing’ channels, but also present in some ‘mainstream’ coverage. Two of the most prominent discourses question the perceived economic costs of taking action and the personal sacrifices involved. We explore the implications of our findings for future research and climate communication.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate delay discourses present in global mainstream television coverage of the IPCC’s 2021 report

Painter

Ettinger

Holmes

et al. 2023

Commun Earth Environ

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“…Still, GND proponents can expect to face some significant political headwinds in building mass public support in the contemporary media and political environment. In the United States, where the GND has been most widely discussed, conservative media outlets such as Fox News have presented GND proposals in a highly unfavorable light (Bhatti et al, 2022), and established among conservative viewers a partisan association between the GND and liberal Democrats (Gustafson et al, 2019). In the context of the country's highly partisan‐polarized politics, GND support has thus evolved from being broad‐based when the idea was relatively nascent to being highly mediated by party affiliation after it received sustained media and political attention (Gustafson et al, 2019; McConnell, 2023).…”

Section: Green New Deal Policies In Comparative Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Green New Deals in comparative perspective

Green

2024

WIREs Climate Change

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In February 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio‐Cortez and Senator Ed Markey introduced into the US Congress a non‐binding resolution for a Green New Deal, with the aim to catalyze policies and programs to rapidly decarbonize the US economy while achieving wider progressive economic, social and environmental goals. This motion sparked widespread interest, in and beyond the US, in the potential for more ambitious and solidaristic climate policy under the banner of a Green New Deal (GND). This Overview, after introducing the history of the GND concept and exploring its dimensions in theory, provides a snapshot of GNDs proposed (or adopted/enacted) by politicians, candidates for political office, political parties and governments around the world in the period 2019–2022. Drawing on theories of comparative politics and comparative political economy, the Overview illuminates key patterns in the prevalence and content of this set of GND proposals, as well as their ideological underpinnings and implicit “theories of change.” Specifically, it ventures that: GND policies are more commonly proposed in high‐income, industrialized democracies; variation in GNDs' prevalence and content are associated with varieties of capitalism and electoral institutions; GND policies are more commonly proposed by left‐of‐center parties and candidates; and GNDs are being proposed at all levels of government, but their content is shaped by constraints on government powers. On the basis of this analysis, the concluding section proposes a detailed research agenda on GNDs, with an emphasis on comparative research.This article is categorized under: The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Benefits of Mitigation Policy and Governance > National Climate Change Policy Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance

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“…The media also played a large role, with attention to Fox News being associated with negative opinion change related to global warming for Republicans, whereas attention to CNN was associated with positive opinion change among both Republicans and Democrats (Ballew et al., 2022). For example, in its coverage of the Green New Deal, Fox News coverage was much more negative than other networks (Bhatti et al., 2022). This pattern of results is not surprising given that Fox has historically taken a much more skeptical view about climate change than CNN or MSNBC (Feldman et al., 2012).…”

Section: Media and Climate Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The example of the Green New Deal discussed earlier illustrates these dynamics (Gustafson et al., 2019). The basic policy ideas were broadly supported before the policy was tied to partisan cues, and this partisanship became amplified by the media (Bhatti et al., 2022), after which public opinion became sharply polarized, which undermined the likelihood of policy enactment.…”

Section: Policy and Research Recommendationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The connections—and misconnections—between the public and politicians over climate policy: A social psychological perspective

Sherman,

Van Boven

2023

Social Issues Policy Review

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We review findings from social psychology and related fields to examine the bidirectional relationship between the public—what are their views about climate change and the need for policies to address the climate crisis—and the politicians who are making (or not making) climate policy and beholden to electoral constraints. We illustrate social psychological pressures that influence policy support and their relevance to how policies emerge from coordinated action and how barriers impede policy progress. We review two factors that have been the focus of research within communication, political science, and psychology and that are relevant to how climate policies are promoted (or undermined): activists and the media. We examine the process by which activists amplify and transmit the preferences of the public to politicians, and how research on persuasion and social norms helps understand how this effect can be amplified or diminished. We also describe how the media environment can amplify or diminish the roles of the public and the politicians in influencing each other. As the world confronts the climate crisis, research from social psychologists, environmental psychologists, political scientists, and communication scholars has examined the interrelations between the public, politicians, media, and activists, but largely in a disconnected way. The current paper provides a social psychological framework to integrate these approaches and, in so doing, suggest new directions for research and theory‐guided ways to influence policy around climate change.

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Major Media Outlets and Climate Change Action: Comparing US Media Coverage of the Green New Deal

Cited by 7 publications

References 36 publications

Climate delay discourses present in global mainstream television coverage of the IPCC’s 2021 report

Climate delay discourses present in global mainstream television coverage of the IPCC’s 2021 report

Green New Deals in comparative perspective

The connections—and misconnections—between the public and politicians over climate policy: A social psychological perspective

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