How well does the press cover climate change?

And how well does it serve the public?

One of the treats of working on Substack is discovering great writers. One of them is Amanda Royal, who consistently produces a high quality newsletter, Earth Hope, that concentrates on the environmental success stories: endangered species bouncing back, people working together to solve the problem of climate change, and more.

Amanda had an interesting take on the Washington Post firing most of its climate reporters. Almost everyone outside the Fox/rightwing talk radio universe condemned the move, saying that Jeff Bezos, who owns the paper, was capitulating to the climate denying Trump administration. Royal disagrees. To Bezos and to the Post she says good riddance, going on to say in her post:

Legacy media is so captured by herd mentality and groupthink, so caught up in fearmongering and rage-baiting, that the countless solutions and success stories in the United States appear only once or twice a year on their pages. These stories are so numerous and widespread across the globe, at Earth Hope, we struggle to fit them all into our hopeful headline roundups.

While the Post has had a Climate Solutions page, Amanda says, much of the content is journalistic drivel, what she calls “feeding the editorial beast” that dilutes the important news. Her critique has much more to say about the Post and other newspapers and news sources. I highly encourage you to check it out here.

I share many of the same views and have the many of the same criticisms of the Post and other newspapers. After all, I was motivated to start The Green Dispatch because I saw a real lack of coverage of many interesting and important environmental stories in the press. Part of my studies for my master’s degree was on newspaper coverage of global warming. And I’ve voiced my complaints about how the press has covered climate change for over a dozen years now.

So I thought I would take a look at what researchers and those who keep an eye on environmental and climate coverage had to say.

Reuters conducted an online survey in November of 2024 of people living in eight countries: Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan, Pakistan, the U.K., and the U.S. They asked how folks received their climate news, how often, and how they perceived the problem of climate change.

Across countries they found that people pay more attention to climate news if it is local (52%) and if the news concerns the weather (54%). The public greatly trust scientists (74%) and half say they trust the press (50%) on this issue.

France stood out for having the most engaged public, with 60 percent of survey respondents saying they read or listen to climate news. With partisan politics and MAGA probably having an effect, the U.S. stood out at the other end of the spectrum; only 34 percent of our public consumes news on global heating, a 16 percentage point drop since 2023.

And politics, unfortunately, does play a part. Those who identify as left expressed climate concerns 91 percent of the time. Concern drops to 77 percent for folks on the right.

In general, across all countries, Reuters found what they term “climate perception inertia.” There is a stagnation in engagement with climate issues and information, despite the increasing urgency for climate action. This is probably inevitable. Climate change has been in the headlines since the eighties. People tend not to stay involved with stories that last that long. I remember when I was a kid, and when the Mercury program shot men up in space, people were glued to their radios and TVs. And when two men first landed on the Moon, folks went out and bought televisions so they could watch it. Only a few years later, as astronauts returned to the Moon, some people were unaware that they were there.

All of us are swayed by the presentation of climate news, both fact-based and skeptical or denialist presentations. An Ohio State University study had folks read a scientifically based article on climate change. The people in the study were likely to believe the material in the article; they also thought that global heating should be a prominent governmental concern and government should do more about the problem.

Even though these folks had read a fact-based article, when study subjects later read an article skeptical of climate change, their views shifted to skepticism.

We have our criticisms of news coverage, but the coverage is there. Researchers used MediaCloud database to look at more than 9,000 news sources across the U.S., from small town papers to national publications like The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

They found between 2011 and 2022 regional news sources increased their coverage of climate change by 144 percent. But the national papers, what a lot of folks critical of the press call “legacy media,” increased coverage by 299 percent, basically, three times more than their 2011 coverage. This research was published in the journal Climate Change in 2024.

This may account for a regional divide. In 2024, found something of a rural/urban divide in the U.S. Almost 15 percent of Americans deny the reality of climate change. Most of those rejecting the science live in the central states and the South, with the rate of denial in some states exceeds 20 percent. Folks who live on the West Coast, Northern Atlantic states, and New England, places where the major newspapers dominate, tend to believe the science.

What effect does climate news have on people?

People who are aware of and worry, at least a bit, about environmental issues are more likely to do something environmentally positive, join or donate to an environmental organization, recycle, walk instead of driving.

Research performed by Lorraine Whitmarsh, a professor at University of Bath in environmental psychology and published in 2022 found that in people in the United Kingdom had high levels of concern about climate change. But there was little of what is called climate anxiety.

Younger people reported having higher levels of climate anxiety than older folks. And while we think of climate anxiety as petrifying, keeping people from taking action on climate change, that was not the conclusion of Whitmarsh and other researchers. She says, “Consistent with other recent research, these findings indicate that climate anxiety may not necessarily be a negative impact of, or maladaptive response to, climate change; but rather, at least to some degree, be a motivating force for effective action.”

There is other good news. While a great number of Americans worry, and worry frequently about global heating, few, only around ten percent, experience climate anxiety. Although this is undesirous on a personal level, very few are fatalistic. We might be worried, we might be almost out of our wits frightened, but just about everybody thinks we can solve this problem.

What about you? Do you often read or listen to environmental news. Where do you get your news from? Does thinking or reading about the climate crisis cause you anxiety? Please share your thoughts by clicking the button below.

Here is a previous Green Dispatch about how people perceive of the problem of climate change: