Outlet Bias in U.S. Newspaper Coverage of Climate Change: Evidence from an Automated Content Analysis

• In Event: 2251 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 16. Framing of Environmental Issues

Abstract

News organizations constitute key sites of science communication between experts and lay audiences, giving many individuals their basic worldview of complex topics such as climate change. Previous researchers have studied climate change news coverage to assess accuracy in reporting and potential sources of bias. These studies typically rely on manually coding a limited number of articles from a handful of prestigious outlets, not allowing comparisons with smaller newspapers or providing sufficient diversity to assess ideological influence of content production. This study indicates that partisan bias affects news coverage of climate change around a few key topics. After assembling a corpus of over 60,000 articles spanning two decades from 42 newspapers that are diverse in terms of geography, partisan orientation, and scale of circulation, we applied an automated content analysis to identify a coherent set of topics in the climate change news discourse. Topic model results indicate that while outlet bias does not appear to impact attention to most topics surrounding climate change, substantial differences by partisan orientation were evident over the coverage of perceived scientist corruption and the editorial presentation of climate skeptic arguments. These differences may explain potential sources of partisan cues that exacerbate polarization apparent in climate change debates. Overall, this paper provides a comprehensive study of U.S. newspaper coverage of climate change and identifies specific topics where outlet bias constitutes an important contextual factor explaining differences in media coverage.

Author

• Jeremiah Bohr, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh