Media

Major national differences in reporting of climate scepticism says study

10 November 2011

An Oxford University study of climate change coverage in six countries suggests that newspapers in the UK and the US have given far more column space to the voices of climate sceptics than the press in Brazil, France, India and China. More than 80 per cent of the times that sceptical voices were included, they were in pieces in the UK and US press, according to the research.

The study, Poles Apart – The international reporting of climate scepticism, shows that 44 per cent of all the articles in which sceptical voices were included were in the opinion pages and editorials, as compared with the news pages. It also finds that in the UK and the US the ‘right-leaning’ press carried significantly more climate sceptical opinion pieces than the ‘left-leaning’ newspapers.

A team of researchers led by James Painter, from the University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, examined more than 3,000 articles from two different newspaper titles in each country during two separate periods. In each country (apart from China), the newspapers were selected to represent divergent political viewpoints. The periods studied were February to April 2007 and mid-November 2009 to mid-February  2010, which included the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen and ‘Climategate’.

Although the researchers discovered a link between the amount of coverage given to climate sceptics and the political viewpoint of newspaper titles in the UK and the US, this link did not appear in the other study countries – Brazil, France and India. In the latter, few sceptical voices appeared and there was little or no difference between that country’s two selected titles in the amount of space given to the sceptical viewpoints. In all the countries, politicians represented around a third of all the sceptical voices quoted or mentioned, with the UK and US newspapers much more likely to quote politicians than the press in other countries.

The ‘Poles Apart’ study defines climate sceptical voices as those sceptical that the world is warming or those that question the influence of humans in the warming. It also includes those sceptical about the pace and extent of its impacts, or about whether urgent action and government spending are necessary to combat it.

James Painter, RISJ researcher and Head of the Journalism Fellowship Programme, said: ‘There are politicians in the UK and the US who espouse some variation of climate scepticism. Both countries also have organisations for ‘climate change sceptics’ that provide a sceptical voice for the media, particularly in those media outlets that are more receptive to this message.  This is why we see more sceptical coverage in the Anglo-Saxon countries than we do in the other countries in the study where one or more of those factors appear to be absent.’

The research includes a detailed examination of several hundred articles in ten British national newspapers to see where views about climate scepticism receive the most coverage, and which sceptics and organisations are most quoted.

The countries and media included in the study were Brazil (Folha de São Paulo, Estado de São Paulo), China (People’s Daily, Beijing Evening News), France (Le Monde, Le Figaro), India (Times of India, The Hindu), the UK (all ten national newspapers) and the USA (New York Times, Wall Street Journal). The study was carried out with research assistance from the British Council, who also financed the study along with the European Climate Foundation and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.

James Painter worked as a journalist for several years at the BBC World Service in various capacities including Americas Executive Editor and head of the Spanish American Service. He has written extensively on climate change, the media and Latin America for several organisations and publications, including the BBC, the UNDP, Oxfam and Oxford Analytica. He is the author of the RISJ publications Summoned by Science: Reporting Climate Change at Copenhagen and Beyond and Counter-Hegemonic News: A Case Study of Al-Jazeera English and Telesur.

For a pdf or copy of the full report, or to interview the report author James Painter, please contact the University of Oxford Press Office on 01865 280534 or press.office@admin.ox.ac.uk

Notes to editors

‘Poles Apart – The international Reporting of Climate Change’, by James Painter will be published by the RISJ on 10 November 2011.

  • `Climategate’ refers to an episode in November 2009 when e-mails and documents hacked or leaked from one of the world's leading climate research institutions were published which suggested that scientists had been manipulating or hiding data. The emails were released just days before the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen when the threat of climate change and the need for global action was headline news.

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
The Thomson Reuters Foundation is the core funder of the (RISJ) Institute, based in the Department of Politics and International Relations. The Institute was launched in November 2006 and developed from the Reuters Fellowship Programme, established at Oxford 28 years ago. The Institute, an international research centre in the comparative study of journalism, aims to be global in its perspective and provides a leading forum for scholars from a wide range of disciplines to engage with journalists from around the world.For more information, go to http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/

Comments on the study (from leading academics, media analysts and journalists
‘The best and most scrupulous study of media reporting of climate change scepticism yet carried out. The author shows that such scepticism is mostly confined to the Anglo-Saxon world and discusses why this is so.’Lord Anthony Giddens ( Emeritus Professor and former Director of the London School of Economics)‘In Poles Apart, James Painter effectively explores the prevalence of climate contrarian claims through international mass media. His report is a detailed, precise and insightful accounting of how these outlier views have shaped on-going negotiations of possible responses to climate challenges.’Dr Max Boykoff ( Assistant Professor, University of Colorado-Boulder)

‘This study proves that just like the weather, the degree and nature of coverage of contrarian views on climate change varies widely across the globe. This amount of comparative international data is rare and helps to sketch out some significant long term trends in the media climate.’Dr Joe Smith (Senior Lecturer in Environment, Open University)

`Poles Apart is a thoroughly researched study that sheds light on how sceptics find their way into the public opinion's mind through the media – a must-read for journalists who want a better understanding of climate scepticism.’Claudio Angelo (Former Science Editor at Folha de São Paulo newspaper, Brazil)