Major Media Outlets and Climate Change Action: Comparing US Media Coverage of the Green New Deal

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes the CNN and Fox News coverage of the US Green New Deal (GND) introduced in 2018 by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Senator Edward J. Markey and discerns how partisan ideologies are shaping media coverage. Our content analysis of 53 news videos identifies themes, actors, and tones that contextualize the landscape of the GND media representation and examines how these elements may indicate presence of political polarization. The greatest indications of polarization were seen in CNN’s and Fox News’s coverage of sub-themes, actors, and tones. The sub-themes under economics, politics, and climate received the most coverage. On both channels, AOC receives significantly more attention than any other actor. Fox News tends to portray the GND negatively, while CNN’s coverage is more positive or neutral. The study highlights the value of studying additional indicators in detail (sub-themes, actors, and tones) to paint a broader picture of political polarization. Political polarization of media content means different audiences are presented with diverging coverage, which can influence their perception and opinions.

KEYWORDS:

• Green New Deal
• climate change communication
• media content analysis
• political communication
• political polarization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Minor presence if the actor is only mentioned briefly in the video, major presence if the video paid extensive attention to the actor in the video.

2 The codebook contained more variables than reported here. The Lotus and S-Lotus for the variables economic, politics, climate, and energy (themes) are calculated including all variables present in the codebook related to e.g. economic themes.

3 The minor difference in total percentage points between Figures 3–5 is due to rounding off to the closest number.

4 In Figure 6, “Save the planet” refers to the idea that the GND will save the planet or that climate change threatens the safety of the planet; “cost” refers to the question of how the GND will be paid for; “FAQ document” refers to a fact sheet about the GND mistakenly released by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s office, which received widespread media attention (Golshan & Nilsen, 2019); “save life” refers to the idea that the GND will “save life as we know it;” “$93 trillion” refers to a study estimating the cost of the GND at $93 trillion.

5 For the recurring statement FDR’s New Deal, an independent t-test was conducted to confirm whether the 95% confidence intervals overlapped to an extent that two values would be statistically significantly different from each other or not, and it showed that CNN did not mention the New Deal in connection with the GND significantly more than Fox News (CNN 19% (M = 0.19, SE = 0.088), Fox News 3% (M = 0.03, SE = 0.031), t(25.127) = 1.708, p = 0.100).