“A Statistically Representative Climate Change Debate”: Satirical Television News, Scientific Consensus, and Public Perceptions of Global Warming

ABSTRACT

Satirical television news programs provide the public with potential sources of information about climate change. This study uses a segment from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver as a test case for exploring how coverage from such programs that features consensus messaging may influence viewers’ perceptions of global warming. The segment presents a “statistically representative climate change debate” to affirm the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change and satirize television news coverage “balancing” this consensus with skeptics’ arguments. Results from a randomized experiment demonstrate that watching the segment increased viewers’ own belief in global warming, as well as viewers’ perceptions that most scientists believe in global warming. The latter effect was stronger among participants with low interest in the environment and global warming than among those with high interest. The segment’s impact on perceptions of scientists’ views may have mediated its effects on viewers’ own beliefs about global warming.

Notes

¹ Neither Feldman et al. (2012) nor Hmielowski et al. (2014) examined how Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) covered climate change or how viewing PBS was related to climate perceptions.

² The study design was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the authors’ institution. Participation was voluntary, and participants were not offered any compensation.

³ The video was from June 15, 2014 (Pennolino, 2014).

⁴ The attention check questions were asked after the questions on participants’ climate change views to avoid influencing the latter by priming Oliver’s views on the issue.

⁵ When the participants who failed the attention check were included in the analyses, the results were substantively similar to the ones reported next for all analyses except the comparison of means for respondents’ own beliefs about climate change; here, the difference across conditions fell short of statistical significance. Respondents who failed the manipulation check scored significantly lower on this variable than did other treatment condition participants, a pattern that could reflect a general lack of motivation to attend to the message or specific predispositions against attending to messages about climate change and/or from John Oliver.

⁶ Similar results emerged when these interactions were tested through two-way analyses of variance in which a median split was performed on interest. Interest did not differ significantly across conditions, suggesting that the moderator itself was not influenced by the treatment.

⁷ Similar results emerged when these interactions were tested through (a) two-way analyses of variance in which party identification was treated as a three-category variable, and (b) and OLS model where a 5-point measure of political ideology was substituted for party identification.

⁸ Field experiments could also be useful in testing the external validity of the results in regard to setting (laboratory vs. more naturalistic; see Kahan, 2014).