Soundbites and Certainty: Unpacking News Coverage of Climate Change

• In Event: The Story of Tonight: Frames, Indexing, and Attitudes

Abstract

When asked about the connection between Iraq's purported WMD program and terrorist groups, former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld famously quipped about "known knowns" and "unknown unknowns" when assessing complex issues (Rumsfeld 2002). The secretary's ultimate grasp of political reality aside, the quotation remains a gem of epistemology. The world is a complex place; uncertainty is an ever-present reality of modern politics. Since democratic theory assumes well-informed citizens are the bedrock of society one would hope that public debate would be receptive to, and ultimately reflect, expert analysis. Unfortunately, there are numerous times when the public sphere actually perpetuates ambiguity on topics—climate change, vaccine safety, etc.—where expert consensus suggests little need for debate.
The current analysis is motivated by a persistently contentious topic: climate change. While scientists have achieved near unanimous consensus about the issue, news coverage and public opinion polling more generally remains highly—and unnecessarily—uncertain. Clearly, there is a disconnect between what the news should cover based on the best available science, and what is actually broadcast. This in itself is not a novel concept: scholars from many disciplines have lamented the public sphere’s struggle with an ostensibly unambiguous truth (Pollack 2003; Boykoff 2008; Feldman et al. 2012). However, while there is hand-wringing about the failure of public sphere writ-large, less is understood about how different social actors contribute to news coverage as a whole.
To this end, I employ a large-n content analysis of news transcripts from three major television networks (CNN, Fox, MSNBC) from the 1990s through the mid-2010s. Since Lexis transcripts follow a strictly patterned output, I employ a python script to populate a dataset that includes four key components: network, date of broadcast, full quotation attributed to each speaker, and then speaker’s name. A team of research assistants then manually identified each speaker based on type (journalist, expert, or politician). Finally, the file was run through a content analysis program to code the certitude of each statement associated with each speaker. The result is a data file that contains both the overall certitude and that of groups of contributors over time.
When the analysis is complete, it will provide insight on how coverage of climate change has evolved over time. At an immediate level, it will assess how the overall tenor of news coverage echoes shifts in public opinion over this period. More interestingly, it will gauge how guest “sources” like experts and politicians express confidence relative to the background narrative provided by journalists across different points in time.
Addressing this dimension of political communication is more than academic curiosity, it is essential for a well-functioning society (Hart & Childers 2004; Barabas 2005; Manski 2013). It is not simply that the probability of rain influences picnic plans; expressions of confidence or circumspection dramatically influence public perception of complex social and political issues. Indeed, the consequences of misrepresenting certainty in the public sphere—whether it is the health of the planet, the safety vaccines, or any a host of critical issues—carries tangible and long-lasting consequences.

Author

• Andrew Armstrong, George Mason University