Principle 1: Prioritize a Climate Frame in News

News media can increase the salience of climate change by relating its effects (for example, an increase in extreme weather events such as wildfires, drought, and hurricanes) to human causes.

Put succinctly by political scientist Bernard Cohen in 1963, the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about” (Cohen 1963). Consistent with Cohen’s postulate, after surveying potential voters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, journalism scholars Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw (1972) found that the media’s agenda setting, or how frequently and to what degree an outlet features an issue, was powerfully correlated (+0.967) to what voters considered to be a campaign’s most salient issues. Two decades later, John Kingdon (1995) argued that highly salient issues are more likely to be discussed and prioritized by governmental institutions. Significantly, issues that are prominently featured in the news factor more highly in voter decisions about political candidates (Iyengar and Kinder 2010). Subsequent research that included media coverage of climate change found that mainstream media also can influence agenda setting when filtered through social media, an effect that was strongest among those with low levels of political interest (Feezell 2017).

To put this communication theory simply, agenda setting focuses the public’s attention on certain issues in consequential ways.

The challenge to be addressed:

Although 65 percent of American adults are worried about global warming, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that only 33 percent of American adults hear about climate change in the news about once a week or more; the other 67 percent hear about climate change once a month or less often (Marlon et al. 2022).

In June 2022, Gallup data indicated that Americans are not prioritizing climate change as an issue. When asked, “What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?” 2 percent answered, “Environment/Pollution/Climate change” (Gallup 2022).

The climate science:

In a report analyzing extreme weather events of 2016, scientists noted,

some extreme events [such as record global heat, heat across Asia, and a marine heat wave off the coast of Alaska] were not possible in a preindustrial climate. . . . Climate attribution scientists have been predicting that eventually the influence of human-caused climate change would become sufficiently strong as to push events beyond the bounds of natural variability alone. . . . There were a number of marine heat waves examined in this year’s report, and all but one found a role for climate change in increasing the severity of the events. . . . In this report, twenty-one of the twenty-seven papers in this edition identified climate change as a significant driver of an event, while six did not. Of the 131 papers now examined in this report over the last six years, approximately 65% have identified a role for climate change, while about 35% have not found an appreciable effect. (Herring et al. 2018)