In a time when the world is more connected than ever, media serves as the main means of mass communication of information. Specifically, news media is responsible for the spread of information on climate change – one of the most politicized current issues – to the general public. In order to broaden our understanding of how these media platforms report on this polarized issue, we have aimed to observe bias in news reporting trends from sources with varying placements on the political spectrum.

Media on the Right

Right-wing media usually serve as an alternative to mainstream politics and perspectives (Downing, 2001). Consumers of these sources tend to form closed-off communities, illustrated in Figure 1, that have the potential to become eco chambers—areas in which beliefs, such as climate change denial and skepticism, are amplified by repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal (Couldry, 2002; Dryzek, Norgaard, and Schlosberg, 2011). Some tactics employed by these outlets when reporting on climate change include attacking the character of opposing political parties, exaggeration, distraction from the main topic, and construction of true or partly true aspects of information into a misleading message (Benkler et al., 2017).

Figure 1. The creation of eco chambers formed in closed-off communities of right-wing media consumers; these eco chambers are integral for the spread of climate change denial and skepticism. (Adapted from Dryzek, Norgaard, and Schlosberg, 2011).

Right-leaning media, essentially a less extreme version of alternative media, share similarities to right-wing outlets. They either blatantly deny climate change, whether anthropogenic or natural, or if they do accept it, claim it is not a threat and/or it is unsolvable and therefore not of concern (Elsasser & Dunlap, 2012; de Vries et al., 2016).

Media on the Left

On the contrary, left-leaning and left-wing media not only accepts climate change as an anthropogenic phenomenon, but also report on it as more than media on the right (Boykoff and Yulsman, 2013; Schmid-Petri, 2017). In left-leaning sources, scientific climate studies are often cited, and present-tense language is more commonly employed to stress the urgency of the climate emergency (Stecula and Merkley, 2019); however, the use of “balanced reporting” in some left-leaning medias in an attempt to cater to minority viewpoints can lead to denial discourse and increased bias reporting.

Left-wing media employs similar tactics to left-leaning media, however, they also include more risk associated words, as indicated in the upward trend in Figure 2 (Sonnet, 2021; Stecula and Merkley, 2019). This plays into left-wing media’s hyperbolic doom rhetoric which serves to skew the perception of the general public to climate issues (Johns and Jacquet, 2018). This inaccurate or overly complicated method of presenting climate information can invoke feelings of hopelessness in the public, as well as lead to avoidance of further news to deflect negative feelings (Shepherd and Kay, 2012).

Figure 2. The frequency of risk related language (i.e. crisis, threat, dangerous, and endanger) in climate change news coverage from 1988 to 2014 in a combined corpus (Associated Press, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post) (Stecula and Merkley, 2019).

Is Center the Answer?

Will consuming strictly center media remove bias from our climate information intake? In actuality, center media is not synonymous with unbiased media; while it may be the best equipped to report on issues such as climate change in a more scientific and less political lens, center media may omit important perspectives from the right or left for the sake of remaining central, leading to incomplete context in their news and biased reporting (AllSides, 2021c). It is therefore important to understand that the media we consume can never fully be free of bias. The best way to combat this bias is by seeking out a wide range of media, ensuring a well-rounded understanding of the public perception of climate change and leading to better recognition of how political leanings can lead to misinformation and bias.

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