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ABSTRACT
Despite the consensus that exists in scientific literature on the reality of anthropogenic climate change, the American public still has doubts. Research shows that mass media play a role in how this gap developed and why it persists. We assessed cable news coverage from 2013 to ascertain if and how it covered climate science and compared this to a similar study using coverage from 2007 and 2008. We further compared the percentage of coverage affirming climate change in the scientific community to the percentage of coverage affirming climate change in cable news coverage to see if there is a statistically significant difference between the two groups. For the news data we used a Union of Concerned Scientists dataset on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. Our results reveal good and bad news regarding cable news coverage of climate science. We found that while the overall level of affirmation was higher in the scientific community than it was in cable news coverage, MSNBC offered the highest number of media segments and all of them affirmed climate science. Fox News featured segments that challenge climate science, but the overall number of Fox News segments discussing climate science declined compared to 2007–2008 data.
Disclosure
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.