Fwd: Working paper: Investigating 40 years of climate change newspaper coverage in the U.S.

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Loretta Lohman

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10:23 AM (4 hours ago) 10:23 AM
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Dear Friends,

We are pleased to share a new working paper, “From Silence to Whisper: Climate Change in U.S. News Media, 1984–2025,” which is currently under review at a peer-reviewed journal.

Key Findings

  • Climate change accounted for only 0.55% of U.S. newspaper coverage over the past 40 years.

  • Despite limited news media attention, newspaper coverage of climate change has increased substantially over the past 20 years, coinciding with major cultural events and legislative initiatives.

  • Events, such as COP meetings, generated short-term increases in climate change coverage, whereas hurricanes did not.

Climate change is happening, human-caused, harming people now, and solutions are being developed, tested, and implemented around the world. Yet most Americans say they rarely hear about climate change in the media. Is that perception accurate?

Using large language models, we analyzed 40 years of U.S. news content from five major news outlets: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and CNN, comprising 6,482,999 news articles. We analyzed how many articles mentioned climate change vs. other major news topics (e.g., the economy, foreign affairs, social issues, etc.), and how key events contributed to climate coverage in several national U.S. news sources from 1984 to 2025.

Figure 1 displays the total proportion of articles devoted to climate change vs. other national topics over these four decades. The economy (22.41%) and sports and entertainment (19.82%) dominated media coverage, together accounting for more than 42% of all articles. By contrast, climate change received very limited media attention, appearing in only 0.55% of all news articles.

Treemap titled “Figure 1. The U.S. Newspaper Landscape, 1984–2025” showing the proportion of U.S. news coverage by topic over the past 40 years. The largest categories are Economy at 22.41%, Sports and Entertainment at 19.82%, Miscellaneous at 10.09%, Law and Order at 9.67%, International Politics, Affairs, and Foreign Policies at 7.74%, and Domestic Politics and Government at 6.63%. Climate Change is highlighted with a red outline and accounts for only 0.55% of coverage, making it the smallest category. A note explains that climate change and extreme weather were coded as separate binary flags and then integrated into the topic categories for this figure.

Over the past two decades, public awareness and acceptance of climate change and support for related policies have increased. Figure 2 illustrates that media attention to climate change increased substantially over the past four decades as well. We used a mean-shift detection algorithm and identified two points at which climate coverage increased significantly. The first occurred in November 2006, following the release of An Inconvenient Truth and growing institutional attention to climate policy. The second occurred in January 2021, following the Biden administration’s early climate agenda and then later the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act. Each successive period stabilized at a higher level, suggesting that climate change has established a durable, albeit still relatively limited, presence in American news coverage. However, whether this structural upward trend will continue remains to be seen, as the volume of climate coverage has declined since 2023.

Line chart titled “Figure 2. Temporal Trends in Climate Change Coverage, 1984–2025” showing monthly climate change coverage as a percentage of total U.S. news articles. Coverage remained very low from 1984 to the mid-2000s, then increased after a detected change point in November 2006. A second change point appeared in January 2021, after which climate change coverage rose to a higher average level with several sharp spikes, including a peak near 4%. Horizontal red lines indicate average coverage levels within each time segment, and vertical dashed lines indicate change points detected by the PELT algorithm.

We also examined how external events affect climate coverage. Below, we show our findings for two types of events: COP meetings and hurricanes. We found that climate coverage surged on the day COP events began, and that the impact of COP events on coverage was larger for later COP meetings than for earlier ones, for example, COP29 compared with COP1 (Figure 3). By contrast, hurricane landfalls in the United States did not affect climate coverage, and their impact did not vary between earlier and later hurricanes, likely because relatively few stories about hurricanes explain how climate change is making them more dangerous. 

Two-panel line chart titled “Figure 3. Climate Change Coverage Pattern Before and After Major Climate-related Events.” Panel A shows COP events, with climate change coverage increasing immediately at the event start date and then declining over the following 30 days. Panel B shows major hurricane events, with climate change coverage remaining relatively flat before and after the event start date. Thin gray lines represent individual event trajectories, while bold black lines show model-estimated coverage patterns for events occurring earlier, in the middle, and later in the temporal sequence. The figure suggests that COP meetings produced a temporary increase in climate change coverage, whereas hurricanes did not produce a comparable change.

Overall, our findings show that climate change has historically and continues to receive a very small proportion of total news coverage in the U.S. compared to other issues. As a result, few Americans report hearing about climate change even once a month. 

The news media (and increasingly social media) play a critical “agenda setting” role in society – shaping which stories, which topics, and which issues the public and policymakers pay attention to and prioritize. When climate change is not reported or talked about, it slips “out of sight, and out of mind” and its salience fades. 

While researchers and practitioners have made great progress studying and improving the quality of climate communication – including identifying trusted messengers, message frames, and audience analysis (among many other elements), the quantity of climate communication Americans receive remains very limited compared to all the other messages and topics they are bombarded with every day.

U.S. news sources have increasingly covered climate change, but still tend to report it as a specialized scientific, environmental, or political topic rather than as a cross-cutting problem that affects nearly every thing and every one we care about. Over the past 40 years, climate change has become more visible as an issue, but it remains just a whisper in the cacophony of mainstream news.

You can find the full working paper here.

Further Reading from Yale Climate Connections

For media inquiries, please contact Eric Fine and Michaela Hobbs.

For partnership inquiries, please contact Mallika Talwar.

As always, thanks for your interest and support of our work!

On behalf of the research team: Sanguk Lee, Anthony Leiserowitz, Lara Briggs, Huong Ha, and Matthew Goldberg.

Cheers,

Tony
-----
Anthony Leiserowitz, Ph.D.
JoshAni-TomKat Professor of Climate Communication
Director, Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
Yale School of the Environment
(203) 432-4865
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyleiserowitz/
Bluesky: @yaleclimatecomm.bsky.social
climatecommunication.yale.edu
yaleclimateconnections.org
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