The American Academy of Arts and Sciences' recent climate report, Forging Climate Solutions: How to Accelerate Climate Action Across America, continues to shape public discourse. A recent report from the Brookings Institution uses the Academy's climate report as an example of inclusive climate messaging strategies that reach across political divides and build grassroots support. The Academy's work is pivotal in linking climate initiatives to local priorities, such as job creation and pollution reduction, ensuring climate action resonates with all Americans.
There’s a folk theorem in climate policy that if the public paid more attention to climate change their willingness to act would rise. By that theorem, climate policy should be surging because media coverage has been rising.
The problem is: How should we measure media coverage? If our measurements are focused on news outlets read mostly by elites, then lots of apparent media attention to climate change—and the need for action on climate change—could be misleading. Elite America, such as policymakers and business executives, might be paying close attention to climate while the rest of the country is a lot less engaged. If such a gap exists—or is growing—then care is needed to make sure that climate policy is framed in terms that the bulk of the country finds attractive. Indeed, many policy studies (e.g., this one from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences) have suggested that kind of framing as a way to build and sustain political support for action. But does the data support the need for that kind of framing? In short, the answer is yes.
A huge literature on media coverage of climate change has tracked attention to climate change by focusing on media sources that are easy to query—the newspapers of record such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. These papers have seen surging coverage of climate change—a 300% increase since 2012. The biggest increases have happened in the last five years as national newspapers, whose editorial rooms are mostly concentrated along the coasts and in metropolitan areas, expanded their climate desks and significantly increased their coverage. In contrast, smaller news outlets spread across the rest of the country—what we’ll call America’s heartland—have also increased their coverage but at about half that rate.