Between Consensus and Denial: Climate Journalists as Interpretive Community

• In Event: Between Science and the Public: Studies in Science Journalism

Abstract

In the quest to understand media coverage of climate change, this study focuses on climate journalists as key mediators between the sphere of science and the broader public sphere. It surveys climate journalists from five countries and five types of news outlets. Despite their different national and editorial contexts it finds a transnational consensus built around the scientific mainstream view of climate change as propagated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Climate journalists seem to have become part of an interpretive community that crosses national borders. There is no climate change denial among prolific writers but it persists among occasional writers on this topic. Journalists who approve the IPCC consensus tend to draw information from environmentalists, science, and the mass media while those who are skeptical towards climate change rather refrain from scientific sources.

Authors

• Michael Brueggemann, U of Zurich

• Sven Engesser, U of Zurich